


The Book of Love

by ash818



Series: Legacy [4]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Family, Future Fic, Gen, Kid Fic, Next Generation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-17
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-04-26 20:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 34,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5019088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ash818/pseuds/ash818
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not easy being the only halfway normal person in a family of heroes, but Oliver and Felicity's daughter does it with style and class.</p><p>At least, she tries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> _The book of love is long and boring._  
>  _No one can lift the damn thing._  
>  _It’s full of charts and facts and figures_  
>  _and instructions for dancing._  
>   
>  \- The Magnetic Fields

“Abigail.”

Dad’s voice drags her out of a dream. She tries to turn over and sink deeper into sleep, but he shakes her gently.

“Honey, wake up.”

She jerks up to sitting, and Percy makes a whuffling noise and uncurls next to her ankles. “What’s wrong?”

“Take it easy,” Dad says, laying a hand on her shoulder, which is exactly what he would do if the house were on fire. But she knows by his smile and by the absent stroke of his hand over Percy’s coat that everything is all right. “Bundle up, put some shoes on, and let’s go.”

“Go where? What time is it?”

“It’s nearly one.” The smile broadens. “And you’ll see.”

Bleary-eyed, she does as he says, and she follows him downstairs with Percy on her heels. They step out into frigid fog so faint and still it seems almost a shame to disturb it.

Mom is already waiting in the passenger seat of Dad’s car with a sleepy smile, juggling travel mugs and adjusting the heater. She passes a mug to Abby as she climbs in the backseat. “Earl Grey latte with rose syrup. Don’t let the dog try it this time. That was gross.”

“What’s going on?” Abby says, scooting over so Percy can clamber up next to her.

Dad smiles the way he does when he is deeply enjoying knowing something you don’t, and he puts the car in gear.

They drive south of the city, where cliffs rise over the Pacific. Percy leaves wet nose prints all over the window, and Mom turns on terrible noughties music, all whiny boys with guitars. Abby knows it from soft rock stations. A boring old standard comes on, and Mom says, “Oliver, you remember this song. It was all over the radio from one coast to another the summer we took that road trip.”

He shakes his head.

“Yes, you do. You knew every word.”

“That was a long time ago.”

_Honey, I will be loving you til we’re seventy_ , the singer swears, and Mom smiles, sinking lower in the seat. “Remember when seventy sounded really implausibly old?”

Far past the city lights, the deserted road cuts a sinuous path along the coast. The fog clears, the sky turns the blue of wet ink, and a hundred feet below them the ocean ripples silver with moonlight. Dad pulls over on a thick stretch of shoulder. He and Mom slip out of the car, and their breath frosts before them. “Abby, come on.”

“But it’s cold.”

Dad pulls a fuzzy blanket from the trunk, and Mom puts her hands on her hips and says, “Get your butt out here.”

Percy jumps down first, tail wagging, and starts sniffing his way along the guard rail.

Mom and Dad settle on the hood of the car, and Abby climbs up between them in bemusement. The metal is warm through her flannel pajamas, and Dad wraps all three of them in the blanket. Then Mom and Dad lean back on their palms, eyes on the sky.

Over the soft, continuous shhhh of distant waves crashing, Abby says, “What are we looking for?”

“Just be patient,” Dad says.

When the first star shakes loose from the firmament and dives into the sea, Abby gasps.

Next to her, Mom giggles in satisfaction, and then she starts to sing at the slightly too low pitch of someone unaccustomed to it: “Happy birthday to you.” She gives Dad a meaningful glance, then a nudge. “Happy birthday to - come on, Oliver.”

In a dutiful monotone, he joins in: “Happy birthday to you.”

Mom nods approval, and in out-of-tune chorus they sing, “Happy birthday, dear Abby. Happy birthday to you.”

Grinning, Abby pulls her knees up and hugs them to her chest. “Oh my God, you guys.”

Dad nods serenely at another comet as it flashes overhead. “As you can see, I arranged shooting stars for the occasion.”

Abby headbutts his shoulder.

“You don’t think I can do that?” he says, looking down at her. “I’m the mayor.”

“Mmm,” is all Abby replies.

Mom reaches around her to rub his back. “Well done, darling.”

Finally, he cracks a smile. “Thank you.”

Still shaking her head, Abby points at a cluster of brighter stars off to her right. “Is that Gemini?”

Dad leans close, sights along her arm, and moves her pointing finger thirty degrees to the left. “Over here.”

She tips her head sideways. “It doesn’t look like two guys.”

“Apparently in China they don’t think so either,” Mom says. “To them it’s part of two other constellations, right?”

Dad’s brows knit at her. “You remember that?”

“It was a memorable night.”

“Gross, Mom,” Abby mutters, keeping one eye on Percy, who has found something interesting to dig up.

“Not that kind of memorable,” Mom says. “We were stuck in the snow in Blue Falls National Park at two in the morning, and he had a concussion.”

Ah. Of course. “What were you doing out there?”

“Saving my life,” Mom says cheerfully, bumping Abby’s shoulder with hers. “I made him talk to me to keep him awake, and he told me a story about two stars - two lovers - separated by the silvery river, the Milky Way. They could only meet once a year when a flock of birds made a bridge for them.”

Dad shakes his head. “I’d forgotten those stories.”

“I guess Hong Kong was a long time ago,” Abby says.

“I didn’t learn them there,” he says very quietly. “Shado taught me.”

Most of what Abby knows about Shado, she heard from Mom. “I don’t think he’s ever really forgiven himself for her,” she said, turning an apple over in her hands at the kitchen island one night. “It’s hard for him to talk about her.”

Abby will never stop finding it strange that her parents have known her since she was a blob on a sonogram, but she has known them for less than half their lives. There was a time when they were strangers to each other, and there were people they loved whom she will never know and who, under some other set of stars, might have made them happy.

It all could have been so different. One whimsical left turn instead of a right, and they might never have ended up here at all.

But it’s the fourth of January, and Dad ordered the light show. Abby leans against his arm, and she scans the sky. “Thank you for this.”

“This isn’t your whole present,” Mom assures her. “When Jon and Tish get back from Gotham, we’re going to have a nice dinner and go full birthday.”

Abby bites her lip, but she nods.

“Sweet sixteen,” Dad says, tucking the blanket around them more closely. “I’m unclear on this - are you supposed to get sweeter, or are we supposed to be sweet to you?”

“If I get any sweeter, I’ll melt in the rain,” Abby says airily. “Guess it’s gonna have to be you.”

Dad sits up straighter, frowning over at the guard rail. “Percy. Percy!” He shakes his head, slipping free of the blanket. “The hell is he eating?”

By the time he has finished coaxing the half-chewed moldy sandwich out of Percy’s mouth and tossed it over the cliff (holding Percy’s collar, “because I wouldn’t put it past you to jump after it, buddy”), Abby and Mom are huddled together, shivering.

“Time to go home?” Mom says as Dad leads Percy back to the car.

On the long drive back into Starling, Abby uses Percy for a pillow in the back seat, and she listens with half an ear to Mom and Dad’s quiet murmurs up front.

“Yes, I talked to him yesterday. He and Terry tracked down the shipment that got away from us last month.”

Mom sighs. “You had him working a case while he’s supposed to be on his first vacation with his girlfriend?”

Perhaps it’s petty, but Abby can’t help a small measure of relief that there was some Arrowy, fisticuffy reason for Jonny to be three thousand miles away on both New Year’s Eve and her actual birthday. She still can’t believe he took Tish to see _Aida_ on Broadway. If the big jerk paid any attention at all, he would know Abby has been dying to see that show for two years.

Dad chuckles, his fingers tracing the seam of the steering wheel’s leather casing. “I think they had plenty of fun. He still sounded hungover on the phone. And now we know the identity of the Three-Sixteen’s’ buyer in Gotham.”

“Oh, excellent. It’s been a while since we’ve crashed an arms deal.”

“You’ll have to pass it to McKenna and coordinate if you can.”

“I’ve been meaning to set up a TTC lock to share that kind of thing with her.”

“A what?”

“It’s a new kind of lightlink that uses alternating encryption sequences to - ” Mom yawns wide, and her head tips back against the seat. “Mmm. It’s magic. It’s computer magic.”

“Best kind. How secure is it?”

Shop talk. Abby drifts off.

The next time she opens her eyes, she can just make out their profiles in the glow of the dashboard lights, keeping watch over the road winding away before them.

 

When Jonny comes home from Gotham, he smiles for a week straight. Not even a minor fender bender that dents his Beemer can wipe that goofy look off his face.

“I’m glad he’s in such a good mood,” Mom tells Abby at the kitchen island one night, “but he’s sent me the wrong email attachments four times since Monday.”

Abby slides a platter of grilled asparagus her way. “Somehow I doubt he’s just that excited about your arms dealer thing.”

“He’s twitterpated,” Mom says on a sigh. “Happens to the best of us.”

Abby nods ruefully. “You’re strolling along, minding your own business,” she says, hands walking in the air, “looking neither to the left, nor to the right, when all of a sudden, you run smack into a pretty face. Bam!” She makes big, moonstruck eyes. “You begin to get weak in the knees…” Her hands shake in front of her. “Your head’s in a whirl. And then you feel light as a feather.” She flutters her fingers down to the marble countertop, plants them there, and leans ominously toward Mom. “And you completely lose your head.”

Mom laughs, reaching across the island to poke her with the blunt end of her fork. “Just wait ‘til it happens to you.”

Abby sits back, folding her arms. “It’s not going to happen to me.”

“Oh, well, if you’re sure.” Mom spears a hunk of potato straight from the serving dish and pops it in her mouth. “I’ll tell Dad,” she says, slightly muffled. “He needsh shome good newsh.”

At Abby’s birthday dinner that Friday night, Mom and Dad give her a beautifully wrapped box that fits in the palm of her hand. Inside are a set of car keys, and she nearly cries with happiness.

Jon and Tish present her with a beautiful handbag in exactly the style and color Eva Marquez carried in the film adaptation of _Flor de Caña_. The card reads: _To carry those keys around in. Love you, junebug_. Beneath Jon’s illegible signature, in freakishly perfect handwriting, it says: _Happy birthday! With love from Tish._

Abby is certain Jon didn’t pick out the handbag, not least because he is a complete potatohead at presents in general. Only a month ago, he was struggling to come up with a gift for Tish.

“How about a piano?” he asked Abby the first week of December.

“What?” Abby looked up from her homework. “Jonny, no.”

“She had to sell hers when her dad died, and it just seemed like the sort of thing she’d - ”

“You cannot spend that kind of money on the first Christmukkah present.” Abby pointed her pen at him. “You will freak her out.”

“Okay. So, um. Jewelry?”

In the end, Abby found the perfect thing - vintage sheet music of Tish’s favorite jazz standards. She cried when she opened them, and Jonny puffed up like he’d earned himself an Olympic gold medal in boyfriending.

So tonight, Abby hugs Jon and thanks him profusely for the gift, but she’s careful to lean around his shoulder and mouth, “It’s perfect!” at Tish.

“There’s more,” Tish mouths back.

But Mom is fantastically distracting, walking up behind Abby to cover her eyes and frog-march her to the door for the unveiling of the vehicle. Then Abby’s head is full of gorgeous shiny coupe and big ridiculous red bow and pretty little BMW logo. After a lecture on safety features, Dad wants her to take it for a spin right this very second, and who is she to argue with that? He has to slide the passenger seat way, way back to fit, but he must not mind very much, because he mirrors her beaming smile.

So Abby nearly forgets the little data key Tish slipped her in a repurposed jewelry box.

Two days later, when she finally slips it into her glassbook, she discovers it’s a library of a thousand songs. She has to laugh a little bit, looking at how meticulously organized Tish keeps her music. Everything is tagged exhaustively by artist, era, genre, tempo, dominant instrument, and - for God’s sake - mood.

She writes a thank you note on Snoopy stationery, and she slips the key into her new favorite purse.

 

In February, a terrible sinus infection finally kills Jonny’s good mood.

“Is he seriously going Arrowing like that?” Abby asks Dad, watching Jonny sneeze three times in a row on his way to the front door.

“Evil has never heard of sick leave,” Dad says, and then he tips his head at Mom curled up against the other sofa arm. “Or maternity leave.”

Mom lifts her head and rubs her temples. “Mmm, remember that time I forgot to mute my end of the comm when I took a puke break?”

“I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit, just listening.”

“Morning sickness,” Mom says, patting Abby’s knee. “It runs in the family. You’re welcome.”

Abby doesn’t sleep well that night. Sometime after one, she wakes from a nightmare, mostly because her tossing and turning has woken Percy, and he is playfully pouncing on her feet moving under the covers.

She gets out of bed and finds a light on in Mom’s study. Watchtowering from home again.

“Yes, I’ll get it for you,” Mom says, more clipped with Jonny than usual. “Fine. Nothing. Just a headache.” She leans her head on the heel of her hand. “Should I? That hadn’t occurred to me.” She winces. “Sorry. It’s making me grumpy.”

“Hey, Mama,” Abby says.

Mom looks up. “You ok?”

“Fine,” Abby says, sidling in to sit on the loveseat. “How’s crime?”

“Louder than I’d like,” Mom admits. She glares at Percy, who is trying to follow Abby into the room. “Sit.”

Forlornly he takes up a post right at the threshold of her office.

“Abby, honey, take the comm?” Mom says, pulling off her headset. “Just keep an eye out for SCPD - the blue blinkies on the map - and give Jonny a heads up if he gets close. He’s the green blinky.”

Abby comes around to sit on the desk and put on the headset. “Hey.”

“Hey.” The mild surprise sounds kind of funny in the Arrow’s inhumanly deep voice, but not nearly as funny as the stuffy, “Whad are you doing ub?”

“Just walking you home,” Abby says, smiling. “Watchtower’s eyes hurt.”

Leaning back in her chair with her forearm over her eyes, Mom says, “I’m just resting them.”

A few minutes later, the green blinky pauses on the corner of a rooftop. Abby frowns at it. “What are you doing?”

“There’s a gouge in the brick,” Jonny says, and at first it sounds like gouch in the brig. “Not one of mine, though. I’ve never come this way before.”

“Is someone else defacing buildings?”

“Nah, I think this was Dad.” Jonny sounds pleased with the idea.

Abby smiles. “Let’s put a plaque on it.”

“God, you’re a brat.” The green blinky starts moving again. “Is Mom asleep yet?”

Abby swivels around to look at Mom slumped low in the armchair, eyes closed and mouth slightly open. “Think so, yeah.”

“Her headaches are getting bad again.”

“I know.” Abby swivels back to the desk. “Take Philpott home instead of Ulloa.”

Mom’s in bed when Jonny trudges through the back door. A chamomile tea bag is already waiting in the soup bowl-sized mug that Elaine brought Abby from Disney World. Abby picks up the steaming kettle and sets the tea to steep.

“Sudafed,” she says, holding two pills out to Jon. “Drowsy kind. It’ll knock you right out.”

He downs them with tap water, and then he rips a paper towel off the roll and blows his nose with an impressive honk. When picks up the tea mug, his bleary gaze comes into focus on the tiny pink letters: Drama Queen. “Had to be this one, huh?”

“It’s the biggest.” With sympathy, she adds, “At least you saved the day, right?”

“Better than that,” he says thickly. “I gave the arms dealer my germs.”

She tips her head at him.

“I sneezed into the bag before I put it over his head.”

“Truly, the hero Starling deserves.” She points at the kitchen doorway. “Go to bed. Go.”

With a last, self-pitying sniffle, he takes his giant mug of tea upstairs.


	2. Chapter 2

The Arrow frequently leaves social occasions abruptly, which Mom says has always been awkward. Tonight at a fundraiser for Bridge House, Abby makes Jon’s excuses for him as he slips out a side door.

“I hope you didn’t invent another emergency at Panoptic,” Mom mutters to Abby when he is well away. “It’s starting to make us look incompetent.”

“Don’t worry. I told the Kords it’s a gastrointestinal issue he doesn’t like to talk about.”

Tish covers her eyes with one hand. “Oh my God. Abby.”

“What? We can use that one again and again, and no one will ever ask for details.” Then Abby catches sight of Mom’s expression, and she wonders if perhaps that was wrong after all. “I’m sorry, but where is the bad?”

Mom shakes her head. “It’s just that I tried that one too, back in the day.”

Abby can’t help the delighted smile. “Great minds, right?”

Mom glances over her shoulder at Dad. “He was, um. Not pleased.”

Abby rolls her eyes. “Why did you tell him?”

“I didn’t.” Mom frowns at her. “You realize they’re basically detectives, right? They detect things.”

“We’ll come up with something else for next time,” Tish says hurriedly, shuffling Abby toward the buffet table.

“You do that.” Mom scans the room vaguely and mutters, “I need to get somewhere alone with Allie.”

“With - excuse me?” Abby says.

As if it should have been obvious and Abby is weird for asking, Mom says, “My Parallax prototype glassbook.”

Dad claims that, once upon a time, Mom used to actually get embarrassed over the little misunderstandings she generated. That must have been an interesting era.

Abby leads the way right past the shrimp, ugh, and hunts down the grapes and gouda at the end of the spread. She is gesturing Tish over to look at the chocolate-covered strawberries when, right from the other side of a pillar, she hears the name Cuvier.

“She’s got nothing and nobody since he died,” a woman’s voice says. “Sure latched onto the Queens as fast as she could.”

It is too late to lead Tish away. She has already frozen in her tracks.

“No one ever mistook the kid for a genius,” a man’s voice replies. “Some low-cut dresses, and she had him.”

“Couple months, he’ll get bored.”

“Then the tell-all memoir, right? _My Daddy the Mad Scientist_.”

“I’d read it.”

Tish puts on an icy smile, and she comes around the corner of the buffet table. Abby follows a half pace behind.

“Would you like an advance copy?” Tish says.

The couple flushes with embarrassment.

“Oh God, I am…” The woman stands up very straight and takes a step backward. “I am so sorry.”

The man swallows hard. “We didn’t realize you were, ah…”

“A real person?” Abby supplies.

The woman starts chivvying him along, muttering, “We’ll just go… over here.”

Tish raises her glass to them. “Enjoy your evening.”

Then she turns on her heel, and Abby follows her to the ladies’ room.

Tish takes one minute to cry and two to fix her makeup. She can’t quite clean the smeared eyeliner from under her eyes though.

“Come here,” Abby says, digging wipes and concealer out of her purse. She tips Tish’s chin up and goes to work, quick and easy as a costume change between scenes. “There.” She smiles and steps back. “All perfect again.”

“Thank you,” Tish whispers. With her eyes on the stack of hand towels, she says, “Please don’t mention it to Jon.”

Abby nods agreement, because she doesn’t quite trust Jonny to be a grownup about this either. But she also grabs Tish’s shoulder before she can leave. “You know, if anything, we latched onto you.”

A skeptical smile curls just one side of Tish’s mouth.

“We’re kind of spoiled,” Abby insists. “We see something we really, really like, and we just…” She snatches an invisible bit of precious out of the air and cuddles it to her chest.

Tish breaks into a real smile, and she plants a noisy kiss on Abby’s cheek. Abby catches a glimpse of the lipstick print in the mirror before they leave, but she doesn’t bother wiping it off.

It looks cute on her. So there.

She promised not to tell Jonny, but Mom is fair game.

“Do you know their names?” Mom says at her bathroom counter that night. She narrows her eyes at Abby in the mirror, and when she gets a head shake: “Would you recognize them if I found them on social media?”

“Mom,” Abby cautions.

“Fine.” Mom raises her hands in surrender, then sinks heavily into the chair at the vanity and rests her head in her hands. “Jon doesn’t know that’s the gossip, does he?”

Abby shrugs uncomfortably, picking bobby pins out of her own hair. “We didn’t tell him, but I’m sure he knows how it looks.”

“Are you? I’m not.” Mom slumps onto one elbow. “Your dad didn’t think for two seconds about how it would look when he made me his secretary.”

“How did it - oh.”

“Yeah,” Mom says, drawing the word out.

“Can you get this last pin?” When Mom pulls it free of her hair, Abby says, “So somebody should say something to Jonny?”

“Not necessarily.” Mom reaches wearily for her cold cream and gently wipes away her eyeliner. “Dad’s a public figure, and Jon is… colorful. Tish has been involved in some serious drama too, and her dad is making it onto those Buzzfeed-style lists of ‘Top 25 Most Evil’ these days.”

“You kind of lost me. Also, what’s Buzzfeed?”

Mom waves that out of the air with a makeup-smeared tissue. “I’m just saying, they’re going to get talked about no matter what they do, so they might as well do what they want.”

“Ignoring the gossip is different from not knowing anything about it.”

“He doesn’t read the trashy magazines. I’m going to take that as a great big, ‘I don’t want to know,’” Mom says on a sigh. Then she makes a moue and says, “I wonder if Tish does. Maybe I should talk to her.”

Abby sets the last bobby pin aside. “And tell her not to?”

Mom shrugs. “And tell her a couple stories from way back when. Let her make of it what she will.”

Abby reaches for the makeup remover herself. “What kind of stories?”

Mom opens her mouth to answer, then shuts it sharply. Narrows her eyes. “Google it, if you’re so curious.” Then she closes her eyes and shakes her head, setting her ponytail swaying. “No, wait. Don’t.”

Abby cocks an eyebrow, waiting.

“I’m serious,” Mom says. “Don’t.”

Abby sighs. “Okay.”

Sleepless in the early hours of the morning, she opens her glassbook and discovers an old archive of a local paper called the Daily Star. She keys in “Queen,” just to see what comes up, and scrolls past headlines about the wreck of the Gambit, Aunt Thea’s drug arrest, Grandma Queen’s trial, Isabel Rochev’s takeover, Grandma Queen’s murder…

She finally finds an interview with rising tech star Felicity Queen, Vice President and head of applied sciences at Queen Consolidated, shortly after she and former CEO Oliver Queen returned from their honeymoon.

“Oh, God,” she says about halfway through. “Mom.”

She swipes the window clear, and then she watches the last few minutes of The Little Mermaid to swipe her memory clear too.

As soon as she sets aside her glassbook, freeing up her lap, Percy immediately tries to sit on her. “Are you serious? That is not your spot. Over here, baby. Yes, that’s your spot. Good boy.”

They get comfortable, and Abby dreams of sunken ships and red-haired mermaids.

By May, Mom’s migraines are so bad that Jonny refuses to work with her.

“No,” he says flatly on speakerphone. “Get off the comm.”

Slumped over at her desk with her head pillowed on her folded arms and her system glowing over the desktop just above her, Mom makes a grumpy noise. “You need backup.”

“Take your meds and get some sleep.”

Mom lifts her head just enough to glare at the speaker. “If you think you can send me to bed, you are - ”

Click.

Mom turns to Abby in the doorway, face scrunched up in both pain and baffled offense. “The little brat hung up on me.” Her frown deepens, and she turns it on the speaker again. “The big, tall, giant brat.”

Abby comes over with water and pills. “Tonight is just a little routine breaking and entering, right?”

Mom downs half the water glass before she answers. “No such thing. He’s flying blind.”

Abby gestures to the sofa on the other side of the desk, and she conspicuously steps out of Mom’s way. “Why don’t you go ahead and lie down? You can close your eyes, and we’ll try to keep this quiet.”

Mom takes a long look at her and then at the icons bouncing faintly above the desk. “Every blueprint and floorplan you’ll need is already right here,” she says, tapping a blue one with a dotted white box. “Here are traffic cams, building cams, and here are relevant personnel files. Down here is a niffler to get you past network security - but you know what? Don’t touch that. And these are, um.” She swipes the icons down into her desk. “You won’t need those either.”

“If something comes up, you’ll hear.”

Looking absolutely miserable, Mom curls up on the sofa. Abby dims the lights and takes a seat. The user interface for the system is elegantly intuitive, and Abby has seen Mom hail Jonny on the comm a dozen times before. It is easy enough to figure out.

Jonny answers with, “Do I have to read you a picture book?”

“Hey there, Arrow,” Abby murmurs.

“Whoa. Nuh-uh. Not you either.”

Abby raises her eyebrows at the green blinky on the map. “Calm down. I’m just Watchtower’s eyes for the night.”

“Deal with it,” Mom growls, and Jonny makes a noise that could be taken for assent.

In the event, he doesn’t need all that much help. He is burgling a midsize shipping company for their records, and all he needs is a navigator who can also monitor the security guards’ rounds. Milk run or no, every time Abby feeds him information, she twists anxiously in Mom’s chair. One mistake, and she could get him caught.

She is biting her lip over an approaching security guard when Jonny says, “Junebug, this is the men’s room, not the servers.”

“But you’re right where you - wait. What floor are you on?”

“The third,” he says with conspicuous patience.

“Oh, crap,” she hisses. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says, and he has never reminded her so strongly of Dad. “Just get me to the right place.”

On the sofa, Mom rolls onto her side and opens her eyes just long enough to give Abby a wink.

Ten minutes later, Jonny is on his way home, and he thanks Abby for her help.

“Right. Some help I was.”

He chuckles. “Watchtower makes it look easy, keeping track of six thousand things at once. But even she makes mistakes sometimes.”

“Like what?”

He is still on speaker, and Mom shifts attentively on the sofa. Perhaps he knows as much, because he says, “Can’t think of one at the moment.”

“Smart boy,” Mom whispers. Then, loud enough for him to hear: “Junebug can’t do this every night. Who’s going to back you up if you won’t let me do it?”

“I know somebody who knows somebody.”

Mom does not like that. She does not like it at all.

But she is in pain and maybe a little nauseated from the cool blue light of the holodesk. She does not put up any more argument when Abby herds her to bed.

The week after school lets out, the papers announce, _Three Hospitalized, Vertigo Implicated_.

“Initial reports look like a bad reaction to the newest formulation of the drug,” Mom says, bleary-eyed at the breakfast table. “Kind of like an artificially induced panic attack, plus loopy-loo imaginary monsters trying to eat their toes.”

Abby pauses with a spoonful of yogurt halfway to her mouth. “Who induces terrifying hallucinations for fun?”

“It’s like a roller coaster or a haunted house,” Dad says. “Most of the time, you can separate the hallucinations from reality. Overdose, and you can’t.” He scrolls down further, glaring at the screen. “The Count,” he mutters contemptuously, and lays the article aside. “You’d think he’d have noticed how that mantle worked out for the last three guys.”

“Stop trying to make Vertigo happen,” Mom says, face in her hands. “It’s not going to happen.”

“So why do they try?” Abby says. “I thought the drug market collapsed after legalization anyway.”

“For everything previously on the federal government’s schedule of narcotics, yes,” Dad says, and he cannot help the note of disapproval that prohibition was ever repealed at all. “But new, untested drugs in much more potent doses than the law allows? That’s a different story.”

Abby has always found Dad’s attitude to narcotics surprisingly puritanical, given his history.

“It’s because of his history,” Mom tried to explain, which made no sense, because near as Abby can tell, Dad had an absolutely fantastic time with illegal drugs. If TMZ is to be believed, on at least one occasion Dad and Tommy Merlyn entertained a lovely, obliging girl who let them snort cocaine off her skin.

“I wish you didn’t know that,” Dad once said forlornly.

“It’s not my favorite piece of Dad trivia either.”

It is citywide knowledge that Mayor Queen takes a hard line on drugs, but Abby cannot figure out why the Vertigo case has Mom and Dad extra pissed off. In about a year, some corporation or other will synthesize a safer, saner version of the drug, and it will be off the streets and safely minting money for Big Pharma. There is no reason to get so grumpy.

Then Abby reads a few articles about the original Count Vertigo. About how he died.

They can grump. She won’t raise an eyebrow.

By total coincidence, that very week Terry comes to visit.

“Just a little summer vacation,” he calls it. “It’s been a long time since I hit downtown Starling.”

He and Jonny hit downtown every night for a week, and they come home with bruises and haggard expressions. Dad works Watchtower, which Abby finds unsettling for its rarity, and when she brings him a midnight snack in Mom’s office, he has not helpfully left the comm chatter on speakerphone.

Percy follows her into the room, and after she sets tea and toast on the desk, he whines softly and licks her hand. Dad thanks her and absently reaches down to ruffle the silky fluff behind his ears.

She lingers with one hand on the desk, reluctant to go anywhere without a clear line of sight on Dad’s face. “So far, so good?” she says the moment he glances up from the traffic cam.

Dad smiles at her with just his eyes, and when he nods, she takes a slow breath and gets it together. As she leaves the room, she hears him say, “If you can get around the TTC lock from your end and give them the - yes, exactly.”

Abby goes back downstairs to the living room, where Tish and Aunt Thea are dozing in front of _The Princess Bride_ with the volume low.

If you spend any significant amount of time in this house, you cannot escape The Princess Bride. It is Mom’s prescription for boredom, loneliness, worry, heartache, and the common cold. Chicken noodle or rocky road can magnify its curative powers.

Also, she likes to quote it at Dad when he is taking himself too seriously.

Every time Jonny takes off for Gotham because an unspecified vigilante “needs backup, whether that shithead thinks so or not,” the rest of the family eases the anxious waiting with this movie. Apparently it is now S.O.P. when the shithead comes here instead.

Tish and Aunt Thea both sit up when they hear Abby come in, and they aim identical inquisitive expressions at her.

“Nothing yet,” she says.

Aunt Thea groans and sinks deeper into the sofa. Onscreen, the only thing better than true love is a nice MLT, when the mutton is nice and lean and the tomatoes are ripe. Mmm.

Aunt Thea cocks her head. “Anybody hungry?”

Yes, actually. “I think I want something sweet.”

“Oatmeal raisin cookies?” Tish suggests, probably because she can do those in her sleep.

“How about macarons?”

Tish gives her an exasperated look. “Or we could try some nice, simple oatmeal raisin cookies.”

Aunt Thea is already transferring the movie to the kitchen’s holo display. “Nah. I think we need something to keep us busy more than we need the sugar.”

Abby nods. “Macarons.”

Tish gets to her feet, theatrically rolling her eyes, and she pokes Abby in the ribs on her way to the kitchen. “As you wish.”

When the boys come home in loose sweatpants and T-shirts, exhausted and bruised and bandaged as best they could manage in the lair, there are dozens of pale yellow macarons waiting on the counter. Aunt Thea has long since gone home, and it is just Abby and Tish swinging their feet at the kitchen island.

“Holy shit,” Terry says, coming close to stare at the macarons. “That’s not food. It’s too perfect to be food.”

Abby pushes the plate his way. “That’s because we ate the ugly ones.”

He goes for the cookies, and Jonny goes for Tish. It is kind of nice, being able to share an eye roll with Terry over it.

“So, successful night out?” she asks him.

He smiles, because he seems to enjoy playing you know I know you know, but we both know better than to admit that we know. “Yeah. Wrapped the night up in a bow.” He bites into a macaron, and with his mouth full, he turns wide eyes on Tish. “You made these?”

She smiles, fetches milk from the fridge, and starts catching up on the news from Gotham. Jonny passes on macarons - “Not hungry” - and also passes right by the hug Abby intended to give him. Instead he plops down in a chair at the kitchen table and leans his elbows on his knees.

She cannot help but notice he didn’t pass by his girlfriend.

Ninety-five percent of the time, Abby is happy to share her family and even happier to remind everyone exactly who introduced her brother to his girlfriend. But the other five percent of the time, Tish is the only thing in Jonny’s entire field of vision. Or she is standing around with her stupid boobs taking up all the attention in the room. See, Terry just glanced at them. He looked away quickly, but Abby saw him do it.

“Do you want _lait chaud à la cannelle_?” Tish asks her.

“Oh, um. Yes, please.”

“Sign me up,” Terry says.

Tish twists around. “Jon?”

When Jonny looks up, his face is pale and his eyes glassy. His breath might be coming a little too shallow.

Tish sets the honey bottle down. “Are you all right?”

He blinks hard a few times, eyes narrowed as if trying to force the three of them into focus.

“Hey,” Terry says, coming around the counter. “Was that blow to the head worse than you told me?”

Jonny looks up at him sharply, like he just insulted Mom or something.

“Let me take a look,” Terry says, taking a few steps his way.

But he pulls up short when Jonny jumps to his feet, and - it makes no sense, she must be missing something - but Abby has not seen that look in her brother’s eyes since the mansion. “Abby,” he says, voice rough and urgent. “Tish. Get out of here now.”

They glance at each other in bewilderment.

With careful calm, Terry says, “Queen, listen to me - ”

“Get away from them,” Jonny growls, circling toward the kitchen island.

Terry’s eyes dart toward the knife block, and he tries to position himself to intercept Jonny. “Hey, I think you got dosed. It’s messing with your head.”

Jonny goes from pale to chalk white. “Shut the fuck up.”

Hands up in appeasement, Terry says, “Jon, it’s Vertigo. Come on, focus.”

“Safe room, now,” Jonny barks at Abby and Tish.

Abby takes a step toward him. “Jonny, it’s just Terry. Everything’s fine.”

He stares at her for a long few seconds as if she just spoke Mandarin, and for a moment she thinks maybe he’ll listen. Then he pulls a kitchen knife from the block.

She takes another step toward him - “Jonny, no, put it down” - and Tish’s arm shoots out to hold her back.

“Don’t you fucking touch her,” Jonny snaps.

Terry shoves both girls toward the door. “Go get Mr. Queen, then get to the safe room. Now!”

Tish drags Abby from the room. The door slams shut behind them, and they hear an awful thud. Distantly Abby hears Percy going nuts, barking and scrabbling at the back door.

“Dad!” she yells.

Behind them, Jonny’s voice bellows, “Where are they? Where the fuck are they?”

Bedheaded in their pajamas, Mom and Dad meet Abby and Tish running down the hall. “Where?” Dad demands.

“Kitchen.”

“Safe room. Go!”

Her parents push past, Dad to the kitchen and Mom to his study.

Double time to the safe room, and before the door has even slid completely shut, they pull up the CCTV. Can’t look away.

Jonny is on his feet in a fighter’s stance, back to the wall, and his eyes are moving from Dad to Terry and back again. Lodged deep in a wood cabinet, the kitchen knife still quivers. Jonny is talking - the CCTV doesn’t have audio, but the cold, feral look on his face - oh, God.  Abby has only seen that look once before, and the very next thing that happened was he killed three people.

He is looking at Dad and Terry like that.

It is an ugly fight, because it is so one-sided. Slams of impact, tangles of grasping hands and locking arms. Dad and Terry hedge Jonny in, and they are not trying to pummel him into submission. Just to grab and hold, using both their weight and strength to pin him.

He, on the other hand, fights like he expects to be dragged away and burned alive. Keeps the wall at his back, lashes out with the power and precision of a cornered predator. Sends Terry sprawling, smashing a chair to kindling. Slams Dad into the wall, and the sheet-rock buckles.

But he can’t fight them both.

He thrashes viciously as they take him to the floor. Dad takes a blow to the gut and Terry narrowly dodges an elbow to the face. Abby presses one hand to the cold steel of the door, and with the other she covers her mouth.

Jonny is yelling when they force him face-down on the floor, and the only words Abby can lip-read are _fuck_ and _motherfucker_.

Tish’s fingers cover Abby’s where they’re clamped around Tish’s upper arm, and distantly Abby realizes she should probably ease up. “They’ve got him,” Tish says quietly. “It’s okay. They’ve got him.”

It’s true; Jonny is not going anywhere. Dad is basically sitting on him, holding his wrists twisted up behind him.

Mom eases her way into the room slowly, carrying the medkit that lives on the top shelf of Dad’s study. In her other hand are two prepped syringes.

Jonny sees the needles and takes a deep, gasping breath. He bucks hard, and his head slams back into Terry’s face.

Blood running from a split lip, Terry shakes off the blow and pins Jonny more securely. Then he covers the back of Jonny’s head with his hand, and he leans over and murmurs to him while Mom sticks him. Once, twice.

She tries to catch his eye while they wait, but he shuts his eyes tight and turns his face away. His chest heaves, and Dad squeezes his shoulder. Rubs his back while the drug takes hold.

“Come on.” Abby slams the heel of her hand down on the big button next to the door. It slides open with a hiss of the pneumatic mechanism, and as soon as the gap is wide enough, Abby slips through.

Jonny lies passed out on the kitchen floor, but rather than treating him as less of a threat, Dad and Terry are binding him as thoroughly as they would an Assassin. Terry looks up from securing his ankles together with kitchen twine, and blood is smeared across his chin where he did a terrible job of wiping it away.

Abby keeps her eyes on Dad. So long as he doesn’t look worried, everything must be under control.

You look at me, he once told her. Right at me and nowhere else.

“Doesn’t he need a hospital?” she asks.

“We can take care of him here,” Dad says quietly.

Mom nods, shading her eyes against the soft lights over the stove. She looks a little green. “That was a serious sedative, and we’ll monitor him closely until we’re sure the drug is out of his system.”

“So he’ll be all right?”

“Bad hangover,” Terry says. “But yeah, he’ll be fine.”

When they are done tying him up, Dad bends down and scoops Jonny up as if he were a child. “Felicity,” he says with a frown, because she is standing with her eyes closed and two fingers pressed to each temple. “Go back to bed. He’s taken care of.”

Mom surveys the room, swallowing back nausea. Terry, Tish, and Abby all nod encouragement.

“Everybody’s good.”

“Yes, we’re fine.”

“Go rest. Feel better.”

With a last look at Jonny, unconscious with his mouth slightly open, Mom grimaces and heads back upstairs.

Dad lets out a grunt of exertion as he straightens, and Jonny’s head falls back awkwardly.

“You want help?” Terry says.

Dad shakes his head. “I’ve got him.”

He carries him away down the hall, and Tish follows close behind.

Suddenly the only sound in the kitchen is Percy whining on the other side of the back door.

Abby turns to Terry. “Are you okay?”

He shrugs. He hasn’t bothered to do a damn thing about the blood, and Abby can just imagine what he’ll think if she tries to do it for him. “You’re bleeding,” she says instead, and sets about making up an ice pack for him.

Utterly spent, Terry sinks into one of the intact chairs at the kitchen table. Abby puts the ice pack in his hands and goes to let poor Percy in the house. He snuffles at her, and when he is satisfied that she is fine, he goes to lick Terry’s hands. Terry bends over to mutter to him and rub his ears.

Abby steps over the matchstick remains of a chair and the shattered porcelain remains of a giant teacup, and she takes the seat closest to Terry. “I thought Vertigo made you hallucinate whatever scared you, not rage out and attack people.”

Terry’s hand smooths over the top of Percy’s head, and somehow Abby finds it comforting that she is not the only person who feels better with the dog’s chin resting on her knee and his big brown eyes staring at her adoringly. Finally Terry looks up to answer her: “Depends on what you hallucinate.”

“Oh.”

Abby has seen Jonny fight. She has even seen him and Dad kill six people in a desperate melee, and it looked… controlled. Brutal and messy at lightning speed, but precise.

There was nothing controlled about Jonny’s flailing as Dad and Terry took him to the floor.

She licks her lips. “What was he seeing?”

Terry looks back down at Percy, bending lower to stroke his back. “I think Joseph Risdon.”

Percy lets out a contented doggy groan, slides down to the floor, and rolls onto his back. Terry obediently rubs his belly.

“He doesn’t show most people his belly so soon,” Abby says, sitting down cross-legged next to his happily flopping tail. “He must know you’re a dog person.”

Terry half-smiles. “It took a lot longer for Wayne’s dog to warm up to me.”

“It sounds like everything in that man’s house is grumpy.” Abby leans back on her palms. “I bet he has grumpy… bath towels.”

Terry breaks into a real smile, and he finds the ticklish spot that makes Percy’s back leg kick.

But the smile doesn’t last.

“Abby? You were kind of pissed at me last time I was here.”

She shakes her head. “Don’t worry about it. You and Jonny worked it out. You could’ve, I don’t know, hugged instead of punching each other. But whatever.”

“I just want it clear,” Terry says slowly, “that the bastard deserved exactly what Jon did to him, okay?” He gives her a very serious look. “It was never about that.”

Abby looks him over - sincere brown eyes, hunched shoulders, fingers splayed on Percy’s belly. Blood smeared across his chin. “Dad says the Arrow isn’t in the business of giving people what they deserve.”

He nods faintly. “He isn’t. But just so we’re clear.”

“Come on. Let’s go check on him.”

Upstairs, Dad has settled Jonny in his room, still restrained in a very complicated series of loops and knots, half-curled on his side on top of the covers. Tish hovers near the doorjamb, eyes on Jonny’s face.

“Until we know he’s lucid,” Dad says, sitting on the edge of the bed, “no one should be in here without me or Terry. Understand?”

Tish and Abby nod.

“He’s deep under, so we’ll have to check on him frequently.” He looks at Abby. “You mind sitting up with him tonight?”

Fifteen minutes later, Abby and Percy are curled up comfortably at the foot of Jonny’s bed, and she is reading on her glassbook. Dad checks Jonny’s restraints, his breathing, and his circulation, and he collapses into the armchair on an exhausted groan.

After hours of dozing and waking up to check on him, Abby misses it when Jonny finally wakes up. She stirs at the sound of his voice asking, “I hurt anybody?”

Gently freeing Jonny’s right hand, Dad says, “You killed a chair.”

“Dad.”

“Terry’s split lip is the worst of it,” Dad admits. “It’s lucky this happened at home. The Count probably dosed you hoping you’d start feeling the effects in public and blow your cover.”

“Yeah. Lucky.” Free of the ropes, Jonny sits up enough to meet Abby’s eyes, and his bleary frown is familiar from past hangovers. “You all right?”

“Not really.” He looks stricken, and she adds, “You also killed the Drama Queen mug.”

He very nearly smiles, flopping back into the pillows.

She pats his knee. “I’m going back to sleep. You probably should too.”

He must think that idea doesn’t suck, because he scoots back a little and slides under the covers. “Can Laurel charge the Count with pretentious dickholery?” he asks Dad. “That’s on the books, right?”

“I’ll ask her tomorrow,” Dad says. “Get some rest.”

Before he leaves, he brushes Jonny’s hair back from his forehead.


	3. Chapter 3

“I killed a possum.”

Dad looks up from a ream of paperwork, nonplussed.

They are not the only two in the house tonight, but it certainly feels like they are. Jonny left an hour ago to pick up Tish for dinner. Milena is not bustling in the kitchen or singing along to Ukrainian pop while she vacuums. Aunt Thea has not made herself comfortable with a glass of wine and a guilty pleasure on TLC.

Mom came home from Panoptic, ate a half-pint of mint chip, and went directly to bed.

“Migraine?” Dad asked her on her way up the stairs. He was all set to start policing the household noise level.

“No,” Mom sighed. “It’s just been that kind of day.”

So it is just Dad and Abby in the bizarre quiet.

She crosses her arms in the doorway of his study. “The other night, coming home from rehearsal. I hit him with my car, I mean.” She grimaces. “Technically, I didn’t kill him myself.”

Dad frowns at her a little sideways, and he nods at his phone facedown on the desk. “I’ll get McKenna on the line to take your confession.”

Abby hugs herself tighter.

Dad’s expression softens, and he gestures her into the room. She closes the heavy double doors behind her - not that there is anyone to hear - and plops down on the leather sofa with a sigh.

“You hit a possum?” he says gently.

“I kind of partially crushed him, and then I didn’t know what to do for him.”

“So you had to leave him there?”

She shakes her head. “I called Jonny.”

“To put the thing out of its misery?”

She never asked him to kill it. She hadn’t thought it through that far. She was crying on the side of the road in the pitch black darkness with her stomach all knotted up, so she called her big brother. It seemed like the thing to do. “I think he did it as nicely as you can do that sort of thing.”

Dad’s expression is sympathetic, but she can tell he still isn’t sure what she’s looking for, telling him all this. If she knew, she’d help him out, but honestly she has no idea either. He takes a stab at it anyway, because he’s Dad and of course he does. “You can call me too, you know.”

At 10:00 pm, she would have. But rehearsals for Cinderella ran long, and then she was rather enjoying getting to know His Royal Highness, Christopher Rupert Windermere Vladimir Carl Alexander Francois Reginald Lancelot Herman Gregory James. You know, with tongue. So it was 2:00 am.

She cuts that line of thought short before she can start blushing.

Perhaps this is what is really bothering her: “It was my fault, but I had to call my big brother to come fix it for me.”

Dad looks even more confused. “What is it you should have done?”

She shrugs helplessly. “At first Jonny said to hit it with a tire iron.”

Dad rolls his eyes.

“Run over it again? I don’t know.”

Dad shakes his head. “Killing is a skill, like anything else, and you haven’t had any practice.”

She sits up a little straighter, because - wow.

She knows her father has not always been a respectable middle-aged man in a tie who solves his problems with money and/or meetings. He isn’t always that man now. But she still feels a little dazed when she runs up against that other side of him.

He must realize as much, because he comes to sit next to her on the sofa. “I could have phrased that less…” He tips his head. “Less like I did.”

“No, you were…” She takes a quick breath, searching for the words. “It makes sense.” Then she sighs, rolling her eyes at herself. “Who am I talking to, anyway? You had to kill fuzzy critters just to eat on the island.”

He smiles faintly. “The first thing I ever killed was a chicken, and I spent a whole day trying to explain to Yao Fei why I shouldn’t have to do it myself.”

“Then he wore you down?”

Dad shakes his head. “Then I got hungry enough.”

Dig once wasted his afternoon trying to teach Abby a few basic self-defense measures. She can’t remember the technique for slipping a pain compliance hold, but she remembers his reply when she claimed she just didn’t have it in her. “Dig says everyone alive today is descended from a long line of survivors. Make us desperate enough, and we’ll surprise even ourselves.”

“You’ve seen it happen,” Dad says quietly.

She has seen her family turn into cold-blooded, hypercompetent strangers in the face of danger, yes. Even Mom, who wears bright colors and smells like the crisp cinnamon of autumn leaves, pressed a knife into Jonny’s hand with every expectation that he would slit throats.

As a child she read about enough plucky heroines and lady knights and sweet Polly Olivers to believe that, if danger ever found her, she would rise to the occasion. In the event, all she managed to contribute was to cry and hyperventilate slightly harder than she would have anyway.

And last night, she called Jonny because some part of her knew exactly what needed to happen, and that he was equal to it.

“I guess I hoped I’d be like that too,” Abby says.

Dad’s brow furrows. “You think you aren’t?”

A second ago, she was perfectly composed. Now the tears hit like a bolt from the blue. Her face heats, her throat constricts, her eyes burn. There is no way to hide it; the best she can do is press her sleeve to her suddenly dripping nose. “I think Risdon kind of settled that question.”

Dad reaches for her. “Junebug.”

Her shoulders stiffen. If he comforts her, she’ll go completely to pieces.

Looking heartbroken, he keeps his hugs to himself. “You did everything right,” he tells her for the dozenth time. “You stayed calm, you followed instructions, and you distracted him at just the right moment.”

“Yes, with heroic tears and snot,” she says in a croaky voice. Look, she’s crying now. What a prodigy.

“Abigail, you’re one of the bravest people I know.”

She casts him an irritable glance, because she is Felicity Smoak Queen’s daughter and she knows bullshit when she hears it.

Dad’s expression of calm sincerity changes by not an eyelash.

“If he’d started with me instead of Jonny,” she says deliberately, and it is as if she took a lead pipe to Dad’s solar plexus. But she keeps talking. “And he offered to stop when I told him who to hurt instead, I don’t know that I could have done what Jonny did. I might have…” She cannot say it above a whisper: “I might have taken the out.”

That kill or die, jump in front of bullets, “take me instead” kind of love? Her whole family does it like that, and you would think it would be comforting. Instead it is, frankly, terrifying.

Dad is slightly hoarse when he tells her, “Mom was pretty pissed off that Jonny didn’t take the out.”

She shakes her head, because that is not the point.

“And if you ever,” Dad says slowly, “try to take a beating for us, you are going to be grounded until you’re thirty.”

“I’m saying I don’t think I could.”

“Baby, how do I…” He scrubs his hands over his face. “Past a certain point, nobody can.”

She looks up, and that little movement makes her realize how tightly she has hunched in on herself.

“Jon wouldn’t have held out forever,” Dad says with absolute, low-voiced certainty. “Everyone has a limit. Everyone breaks.”

She is not going to ask him how he knows that.

“You don’t surround yourself with violence all the time, which I would like to emphasize is a  _good thing_.” He takes a deep breath. “Of course your limit isn’t where Jon’s is. Nobody thinks it should be. I don’t know where you got the idea that it should be.” Then he peers at her, and his hand draped over the back of the sofa moves slightly. He’s rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “Do you understand?”

She has upset him, and he has been refraining from hugging her for a while now. She slides over and leans on him, and he wraps her up readily.

When she has caught her breath, she offers a smile. “Sorry. All this over a possum.”

“I hate those things.” He props his chin on her head. “And they taste awful.”

He might be kidding. If she asks, he will only smile mysteriously, because he enjoys keeping his kids on their toes.

Softly, he says, “You can always come tell me things.”

“I know.”

His arm loosens around her shoulders. “How do you feel about Cafe Lebanon for dinner?”

“I was thinking sushi.”

“We had sushi the other night.” He gets to his feet, reaching for his wallet on the corner of his desk. “Come on, split some baba ganoush with me.”

She swipes under her eyes a couple of times. “But Naruto rolls.”

He shakes his head, jingling his keys. “I’m driving, so we go where I take us.”

They get sushi, and Dad steals the last of Abby’s potstickers.

He dads real good, if you ask her.

 

 

When summer comes, Jonny finds himself an apartment a block from Panoptic.

“He needs his space,” Abby scoffs. “This house is like a million square feet, and he doesn’t have enough space?”

“He’s twenty-three,” Mom says. “He doesn’t want to live at home with his mama.”

No, he’d rather spend all his time with someone much more exciting.

Before Tish, Abby met precious few of Jonny’s girlfriends, and she got along with exactly one. Most seemed more excited to be seen getting in his fast car than to actually be in it with him.

“Would they even be here if our family didn’t have money?” she once grumbled.

“You mean if Jon were smart and funny and and six feet of adorable, but poor?” Mom said. “Yeah, I guess he’d spend his Saturday nights alone.”

Abby cast a dark look at the door he and the aspiring actress (who didn’t even like musical theater - what the hell?) had just disappeared through. “He’d never get away with, ‘Can I borrow a kiss? I promise to give it back.’”

“Maybe not.” Mom pushed their shared chocolate souffle closer to Abby. “Julie was nice. You liked Julie.”

“Apparently Jonny didn’t.”

Tish was Abby’s guarantee that Jon’s recurring plus-one would be able to hold up her end of a conversation. She was willing to accept that, if Jon and Tish were to fall in love, they would want a certain amount of Abby-free time together.

But moving out seems excessive.

In the course of clearing out the last few boxes on the highest shelf of Jonny’s closet, Mom and Abby discover a tattered stuffed tiger. Mom sits on Jonny’s bed, holding one of its torn ears in place, and says, “Hey, little guy.”

Abby sits down next to her, and Percy eagerly sits at her knee. “Was he Jonny’s?”

“Hobbes,” Mom says fondly. “Jonny begged for him in the gift shop at the zoo, and you know Aunt Thea has a weakness for big eyes and pretty please with a cherry on top. She caved.” Mom points to the matted texture of the tiger’s pink nose. “He liked to suck on his nose. Dragged him everywhere and cried when we washed him.”

“Must have been love.” Abby pets his velveteen head. “Somehow I don’t think Jonny named him, though.”

Mom smiles. “That was Dad. He took Jonny and Hobbes sledding that winter, and he wouldn’t tell the poor kid what was so funny about the whole thing.”

“If Jonny couldn’t be bothered to pack his tiger when he moved, does that mean we get custody?” Abby says.

Mom holds the plushie close. “I think it does.” Then she points at Percy. “Not for you. Understand?”

Abby shakes her head and reaches for the next box.

It’s weird, how much changes after Jonny moves out. It’s weird how much doesn’t.

He still drops by to make a nuisance of himself - “Hey, you want to make that zucchini bread again? It would be really, really nice of you. You’d be my favorite sister. Don’t you want to be my favorite sister?” - until Abby smacks him with a throw pillow.

Then she goes to the kitchen, and she pulls up the recipe on her phone and projects the holo over the island. Jonny settles on a stool, grinning triumphantly, and he swipes his fingers through the recipe to make it flicker while she sifts flour. “Favorite.”

“Shut up.”

But when he works nights, there is no comforting creak of the back door when he comes home. There are no boots on the stairs, no pause at her cracked door, and no quiet  _shhk_  of his door closing at the end of the hall.

“Mom’s office is two seconds away,” he points out. “If anything happens, you’ll know pretty damn fast.”

“It’s just not the same,” she says, shrugging.

Not long after that, he invites her over for dinner. They eat takeout on his deep, squishy sofa and watch a ridiculous action movie. He keeps pointing his chopstick at the screen and saying, “No. Nuh-uh. Incorrect. That’s a great way to get kicked in the balls. And what is he racking the slide for? He’s already got a round in the chamber.”

Next morning Abby wakes up under the brand new down comforter in the bedroom, still in her clothes, and wanders into the living room to find him deep asleep on the sofa. Next to her purse is a key and a note that says,  _Hang onto this just in case._

“I wouldn’t think of it as permission to come and go without a heads up,” Mom cautions her.

But it’s nice, not feeling like a guest when she goes over there.

The apartment building is only two blocks from the Lyric Theater, which is terribly convenient. In October when rehearsals begin for  _A Christmas Carol_ , Abby and Tish start hanging out on Jonny’s sofa for a couple hours before they walk over to the theater.

It is over Jonny’s coffee table that Abby tells Tish about Jason, her occasional math tutor, and his brown curls and lopsided smile. He was her first kiss, and her second, and quite a few more after that. Then the kissing stopped, and she was too proud to ask why. A few weeks later, he was going out with Kaylee Watson, and Abby had her answer.

“So I was good enough to fool around with, but not to date,” is how she concludes the story.

Tish sets her mug down in surprise. “Not good enough?”

Abby shrugs. “Or whatever you want to call it.”

Tish tips her head. “If you and I both auditioned for Eponine, who’d get it?”

“Me, probably, but only because my range is lower.”

Tish sips her  _lait chaud a la cannelle_.

“Ooh.” Abby points at her. “You metaphor’d me good.”

Tish gives a little shrug of false modesty.

Just then, the front door opens, and Jonny comes in, tugging off his tie. He must have come straight from Panoptic. When he sees the two of them on his sofa, he smiles.

It is not the same, but it is all right.

 

 

The first weekend in November, Abby sits in her underthings on a chair in Mom’s bathroom, very straight and very still. Standing behind her with a mouth full of bobby pins, Mom keeps saying, “Tell me if anything pokes” and “For the love of God, why does this curl keep trying to escape?”

Abby wants very badly to watch the updo take shape in the mirror, but she is not allowed to turn her head. Tish is sitting in front of her, doing her makeup. “Now blink for me,” she says.

Half an hour later, Abby descends the stairs in a little black dress which she knows immediately Dad does not like.

Fortunately, Prince Christopher Rupert, etc - whose real name is Brandon - likes it just fine. So much so that he dares to compliment her while Dad is still standing right there with his arms crossed. Mom takes an embarrassing number of pictures while Brandon slides the corsage onto Abby’s wrist, and in turn Abby tries hard not to stab him with the pin of the boutonniere.

Out of the corner of her eye, she catches one of Mom and Dad’s wordless conversations.

_Do you see what she’s wearing?_  Dad’s eyebrow demands.

_I see it just fine_ , says the set of Mom’s mouth. Then she turns to Abby and Brandon and says, “You both look wonderful.”

Tish lingers by the staircase, smiling at them.

“Have a nice time,” Dad says on their way out the door, and Abby wants to laugh. Just a nice time, and no better.

“Happy Homecoming!” Mom says. “Curtsy to the Queen for me.”

Abby dances all night, with her friends and with Brandon and with one completely schwasted girl she has never met before. Brandon kisses her on her doorstep when he drops her off. The kiss is quite nice, and he is quite nice, and the whole evening is just absolutely –  _nice_. She feels lovely and daring and perhaps even sophisticated.

But Brandon does not give her butterflies the way that…

“He just doesn’t give me butterflies.”

“Love and butterflies are not the same,” Mom cautions her.

Abby flops down on Mom’s bed. “I know that. But don’t tell me you and Dad didn’t start with some butterflies back in the day.”

“Okay, fine, yes.”

“I want both. I can have both.”

“As long as you’re aware that your average butterfly has an extremely short lifespan and is so fragile you can ruin its wings just by touching them.”

“Oh, stop it.” Abby leans over, hooks her thumbs together in front of Mom’s stomach and wiggles her fingers. “Flutter flutter flutter, let’s be vigilantes together!”

Mom holds up a finger. “That was not the reason.”

Abby leans back, crossing her arms. “It didn’t hurt.”

Without hesitation, Mom says, “No, it did not.”

Mom and Dad’s whole relationship is built on a foundation of mutual admiration which is, honestly, mildly embarrassing. Healthy and adorable and exactly what Abby wants for herself someday, but embarrassing. Dad stares adoringly at Mom when she, say, remotely repurposes the Pentagon’s favorite toys, and Abby cannot look directly at either of them.

Of course, now she has another set of twitterpated people to deal with.

“I guess this is what they’ve always done,” Tish says one night when Jonny is running a mission. “They stand on a wall, and they say, ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you tonight. Not on my watch.’”

Abby narrows her eyes at her. “Is that from the Green Arrow movie?”

“What? No. It is not from the - ” Tish’s eyes widen in mild offense. “It’s Aaron Sorkin.”

Abby shrugs. “It just sounded like it might be from the Green Arrow movie.”

“It’s from an excellent show by a well-respected playwright and director, thank you very much.”

“All right, fine,” Abby says. “But can we not talk about Jonny like that?”

“Like what?”

Like Mom talks about Dad. “We’re not the committee organizing the ticker tape parade.”

“I don’t know where we’d even find ticker tape.”

“It’s just…” How to explain this? “Dad thinks ‘irregardless’ is a word. Jonny thinks, ‘Be careful, sir, this plate is very hot’ means ‘You should immediately touch this plate.’”

Tish smiles. “Feet of clay.”

“I was going to say, ‘They are secretly ubergoobers.’ But sure.”

As if to prove it, not two nights later while Abby is out to dinner with friends, her cell phone rings, and it’s a ghosted number. “Hello?”

“Abby, do you have your epi-pen on you?” says a voice she cannot place right away. Then she realizes: Max Gibson. Abby knows her mostly as Terry’s friend from high school who had a little geek freak when she met Mom last summer.

“In my purse,” Abby says faintly.

“The Arrow’s three blocks away, and he needs it right now.”

“What?”

“Seconds count,” Max says firmly, and all of a sudden Abby realizes what Jonny meant by, I know someone who knows someone. “I need you to listen to me very carefully.”

Max directs her to a back alley in a neighborhood she would ordinarily never walk in alone at night, where she finds the Arrow slumped against a brick wall, wheezing loud enough for her to hear from the sidewalk. She starts running the moment she catches sight of him, pulling the epi-pen from her purse as she goes.

“Jonny? Jonny!” When she hits the pavement next to him, gravel bites through the knees of her jeans. She pushes the hood back, and his face is so puffy his eyes are swollen shut.

His next wheeze could charitably be interpreted as, “Hey.”

“Go ahead and give him the shot,” Max says with that unnerving calm.

Abby sticks him in the leg, waits a few anxious minutes with Max’s soothing voice in her ear. Breathes in, breathes out. Too fast, too deep. Oh, no, this would be a terrible time to hyperventilate. An absolutely terrible time.

“Abby, are you all right?” Max says gently.

She’ll be fine, just as soon as Jonny stops sounding like he is about to die. She doesn’t have Percy to squeeze or Dad’s calm to borrow, so she needs Jonny to just hurry up and be all right. That’s all. “Yeah. Of course.”

Jonny fumbles for her, and he starts patting her knee. He is probably doing it to calm himself down as much as her. She knows how scary it is when your throat closes up, and if she cannot hold it together for her own dignity, she can do it for him.

Slowly, they both catch their breath.

“Feeling better?” she says at last.

“Better,” Jonny rasps.

Abby goes to get her car, and she half-carries the Arrow to her backseat and lets him collapse across it. She listens closely to his breathing all the way to Panoptic.

“What happened?”

He makes a growly noise.

“It was a tree nut processing plant,” Max says over the comm.

“This is humiliating,” Jonny grumbles.

“With all the fine particles in the air, he went all anaphylactic in under ten minutes.”

Abby glares at him in the rearview. “The Arrow’s fancy comprehensive gear does not include a shot of epinephrine?”

“I came armed for bad guys. I didn’t expect to get attacked by a peanut.”

“Almond,” Max says.

“Thanks.”

Abby purses her lips. Mom would have known better than to send him in there at all. “Jonathan, you have reached your quota of poisonings for the year.”

“I don’t disagree,” he says, letting his head fall back heavily.

She gets him all the way up to his penthouse apartment. After he passes out in bed still in his UnderArmour, she checks on him every fifteen minutes until his breathing returns to normal.

“God, you’re a goob,” she sighs, and the nervous twist in her stomach finally eases.


	4. Chapter 4

Junior year means SATs and college fairs and life plans, and Abby might be a little intimidated.

“You know, if you feel like college isn’t for you,” Dad says, sinking into the armchair across from her curled up on the sofa, “we can look at alternative - ”

“You are getting a degree,” Mom says firmly, hip-checking his shoulder.

“I mean, I kind of figured I would,” Abby murmurs.

“We’ll take a road trip,” Mom says, sitting on the sofa next to her with the beginnings of a hopeful smile. “Visit some campuses. What do you think? Any top choices?”

“I was thinking about Gotham University’s School of Performing Arts,” she confesses, hardly daring to look at Dad.

His careful lack of a reaction gives him away.

“I know it’s far,” she says apologetically. “I probably won’t even get in, with that rollercoaster ride my GPA took.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he says, smiling faintly. “You’ve got a hell of an application essay.”

“Oh, yes, inspiring,” she agrees. “Overcoming PTSD after my family’s kidnapping. Admissions boards eat that up with a spoon, right?”

“With two spoons,” Mom says, mussing her hair.

“It’s an excellent essay,” Dad says quietly. “And they’ll see that your grades fell, but they’ll see that you dragged them up again too.”

With all these brochures and virtual tours and aptitude tests, it feels like she’s deciding her whole future, the course of her life from this moment until the river meets the sea. Mom laughs when she says as much.

“A lifetime takes a while,” she says. “A lot can happen while you’re making other plans.”

“Why can’t I just know already?” Abby says on a sigh, sprawling out on the sofa. “Jonny knows exactly who he is and how he fits and what he wants. I used to feel like that.”

“He didn’t used to,” Mom points out. “And he won’t always. Someday he’s going to hang up the hood, and then he’ll have to figure it out all over again. Just like Dad did.”

Abby turns onto her side to look at Mom curiously. “How’d he do it?”

Mom smooths down her skirt, and she cocks her head to the side to think about it. “Well. First he played a lot of tea party with Elaine while his knee healed up.” She makes a moue. “Again.”

Abby smiles. “Dad’s good at tea party.”

“He can nibble imaginary cucumber sandwiches with the best of them,” Mom agrees. “Then Jonny showed up, and Dad was really good at diapers and feeding schedules too. For a while, he spent most of his time here at the house, taking care of Jonny and making me omelets and rubbing my back after work.” She sighs wistfully. “I could go back to that, honestly.”

“But it didn’t make him happy?”

Mom lays her head back on the sofa. “It made him goofy happy.”

“Then why get on the board at QC? Why do all the nonprofits and the fundraising and the shaking hands with people he doesn’t even like?”

“He thought he could do a lot for Starling with QC’s resources and influence. And he was right.”

Abby frowns. “There’s no law that he has to be doing something for Starling. He couldn’t just… be?”

“That’s who he is,” Mom says simply. “It’s who he’s made himself.”

Abby rolls onto her back, and she sighs her most theatrical sigh. “I’m going to be an heiress with my own reality show, okay?”

Mom reaches for her glass of wine. “Okay, baby. But college first.”

 

It is December, and Abby stands in Jon’s doorway, hugging herself and watching him shove athleticwear into a bag. Percy turns in anxious circles just behind her, picking up on the mood. “I booked the flight,” she says. “You should touch down in Gotham before ten.”

“Thanks.” He slams a drawer shut. Mutters under his breath, “Fucking moron.”

“You mean Terry?” she says, crouching down to rub Percy’s ears.

“That slinky bitch nearly killed him last time, and the idiot thinks he’s going after her alone.”

“Who?”

He swipes shoes out of the bottom of his closet and throws them in too. “She has a stupid stage name, and she spells it like a pretentious douche.”

Abby knows deliberate non-answers when she hears them, and she digs no deeper. “Please be careful.”

He yanks the zipper closed. “I am going to very carefully punch her in the throat.”

“Maybe shoot her instead,” Mom suggests, leaning her head in.

“Can’t bring a fifty-five pound recurve on a plane, Mom.”

She nods. “That’s why there’s an exact replica waiting for you in Gotham.”

He frowns. “How did you manage that so fast?”

“I didn’t,” she says, as though she wishes she had. “Someone else planned ahead for a rainy day.”

Jon shakes his head. “Thank God for the bastard’s paranoia.”

“Terry bought you a bow?” Abby says, trying to lift the mood. “That’s sweet.”

Finally, Jon cracks a smile.

“The rest of your gear is already in the car,” Mom says.

He hefts the bag over his shoulder. “All right. let’s go.”

Mom nods sharply, keys jingling in her hand, and leads the way. Abby and Percy follow them to the front door, and Jon ruffles her hair and then the dog’s before he steps outside.

Watching from the window, Abby can just barely overhear a brief argument over who is driving. Then she watches Mom brace herself in the passenger seat as Jonny puts the car in gear, and they zoom down the driveway like a bat out of hell.

Abby spends most of the next two school days sneaking glances at her phone during class. At home, she hugs on Percy as needed, and she limits herself to just four times asking Mom and Dad, “Have you heard anything?”

In the middle of the third night, she wakes from a hazy dream with an anxious twist in her chest, and she reaches for Percy, curled at her feet. He comes over to step on her a few times, give her a few messy kisses, and sneeze on her pajamas. Then he jumps down to the floor, tail waving hopefully.

The painful clench in her chest eases. “Yeah, okay.”

She finds her parents at the kitchen table with two steaming mugs, talking in low voices.

“You okay, junebug?” Dad says.

“Percy wants to go outside.”

Dad lets that pass, watching the dog trot out into the backyard. Then he pushes out a chair for Abby.

“Are they going to let us know when they actually go do the thing?” she asks, coming to sit down with them. “I don’t even know how worried to be.”

Mom glances at her phone, which rests face-up next to her elbow. “For the moment, no news is good news.”

“I thought I was used to this,” Abby says, and sighs down into her chair.

“He’s far away this time,” Dad says, hooking his ankle around her chair leg and tugging her closer to the table. Also, incidentally, closer to him. “Of course it doesn’t feel the same.”

Mom nods, sliding her mug toward Abby. “I used to hate away missions when I couldn’t go with the team. I’d be doing the exact same job from home, but I still didn’t like it.”

Abby takes a deep sip of the chamomile latte. “Well, yes, but.” She sets the mug down, regarding the peaks and swirls in the foam. “There’s not a lot I can do for him even when he’s here.”

Her parents give her deeply skeptical looks. “Epi-pen,” they say at the exact same time.

All right, that’s a fact. “I take it Max is Watchtowering for both of them?”

Mom nods. “She knows Gotham a lot better than I do.”

“Let’s hope she doesn’t poison him this time.”

“Abby,” Mom says, hooking her mug by the handle and sliding it back. “You know that’s not fair. Bad things can just as easily happen with me on the comm.”

Dad nods agreement, getting up and heading for the stove. “She almost ran me into a bus once. And another time, she sent me straight into a - ” Over his shoulder he catches sight of the look on Mom’s face, and he rounds it off with, “No one is perfect.”

“Ran him into a what?” Abby asks Mom, because it often feels like open season on Dad’s pratfalls and foibles, while he is usually much more reticent about criticizing Mom.

“Do you want sugar?” Dad interrupts from the stove, where he is pouring foamed milk into a mug from the copper saucepan.

“Yes, please.”

“We’ll probably hear from the boys before dawn,” Dad says, spooning sugar into Abby’s latte. “Until then, let’s not borrow trouble.”

They talk holiday plans instead, getting warmer and drowsier with the chamomile, until Percy whines to be let in. Not until Abby is back in bed with the dog curled up behind her knees does it occur to her to wonder what Mom and Dad were talking about so quietly in the middle of the night.

She wakes to a family group text timestamped 2:46 am:  _it’s done, everybody’s fine_

“That’s all we get?” Mom complains, holding up her phone indignantly at breakfast. “Is it too much to ask for a little after-action report?”

“You know he plays it close to the vest,” Dad says, which does not sound like Jonny at all. He must mean The Masked Vigilante Whose Name We Pretend Not to Know.

GNN announces the capture of a cat burglar for hire known only as Inque. Gotham Police Department brought her in sometime between three and four o’clock this morning.

As witnesses can attest, if anyone is curious, Terry McGinnis and Jonathan Queen were on the other side of town at the time, getting themselves kicked out of Finn McCool’s for improper use of a dart board.

Mom and Dad’s goodbye kiss lingers a little longer than usual this morning, and he whispers in her ear before she leaves.

Abby doesn’t need to ask what they were talking about in the kitchen last night.

 

The winter of 2043 is the longest, coldest, and darkest Starling has seen in fifty years. They don’t see the sun for six weeks straight, and by mid-January Abby feels as gray inside as the sky overhead. For the first time in over a year, she misses a few days of school.

“Have you been taking your medication?” Mom says, sitting on the edge of Abby’s bed. “You’re not in trouble if the answer is no. We just want to make sure you’re getting what you need.”

“I’ve been taking it,” Abby says truthfully. But it doesn’t help, because she is broken and will never work right and there is no fixing her, and maybe all the medicine ever did was paper over her cracks so she could pass for a functional human being.

Mom nods slowly. “Okay. I’m thinking maybe it’s time to go back to the therapist.”

The therapist would probably remind Abby that just because you feel it doesn’t mean it’s true, and she might even ask for evidence both against and in favor of the proposition that Abby is just irredeemably broken forever. She is a nice lady, and she will have plenty of rational, helpful things to say. At the moment Abby genuinely does not care whether she ever sees her again.

She is also pretty iffy on things like eating, brushing her hair, going outside, or wearing clothes that are not pajamas.

“Step one is a hot bath,” Mom says, pulling the covers back. “I already ran it for you, and it’s getting cold.”

“I’d rather just sleep.”

“Come on.” Mom tickles her, which is maddeningly annoying but forces her upright. “You’ll feel better.”

Abby soaks in citrus-scented bath salts, and she does feel better. Just a little bit.

When the worst of the depressive episode has passed, she seeks out the music that will get her moving, or just put a melody to her moods, and she finds it in Tish’s library. In fact, she finds so much of it that she’s ashamed she didn’t realize sooner - “That wasn’t your music library you gave me.”

Tish shakes her head. “Just a playlist.”

“I kept finding things that were… that couldn’t have been there by coincidence. All these whispery sopranos with guitars who sounded like they were talking directly to me.”

“I hoped they would.”

“Thank you for putting it together.”

The music helps, but not nearly enough.

“MDD with seasonal pattern,” the therapist calls it. “It’s not uncommon.”

After a few days of research, Mom sets up a light box and several mirrors at Abby’s desk, which most of the time she feels too pathetic to actually use. Aunt Thea takes her for a little retail therapy, despite Mom and Dad’s reservations about that tactic. “It will help,” Aunt Thea says confidently. “It’s hard to feel like shit when your jeans fit like J Lo.”

“Like what?” Abby says.

Even Elaine finds time in the midst of her ridiculously hellacious residency to take Abby to dinner a few times. She mentions not a word about depression, not even to say, “So I heard you’ve been having a hard time lately.” Nor does she ask about school, auditions, or any of the other things Abby currently sucks at.

Instead she asks gentle questions about what Abby has been reading or watching lately. Before she knows it, Abby is babbling at her about the Amelia Peabody movies, and Elaine is grinning wide.

Dad and Jonny both push exercise as an antidepressant. Endorphins, dopamine, body chemistry, etc. Halfheartedly Abby tries out Mom’s yoga class, which is unbearably boring. Swimming is a pain in the ass, with the wet hair and the chlorine smell. Jonny’s next suggestion is even stupider.

“Martial arts?” Abby says on a sigh. “I thought I already told you - no, thank you.”

“Hey, I’m happy with the idea that you are never, ever going to break anyone’s jaw,” Jonny says. “That’s great. That works for me.”

She sits back in her chair. “But?”

“But I’m afraid one day someone’s jaw is going to need breaking, and I won’t be there.” At her skeptical expression, he says, “Look, I’m going to show Tish a few things this weekend. Come with her, and you can do it together. Just try it. Please?”

That Saturday morning, Abby dutifully shows up at Jon’s apartment. She can’t remember whether they said nine or nine thirty, and when no one answers the door, she shrugs and lets herself in. She’ll watch a little TV while she waits for them to get back from breakfast or wherever.

Oh, crap. No, she won’t.

Lying across the back of one of the living room chairs is Tish’s favorite white sweater. On the seat is her polka dot skirt and a lacy white bra that is, Abby knows, a marvel of engineering. There is another scrap of lace on the floor that she does not inspect too closely.

Propped haphazardly across the seat of the other chair is a riding crop.

“Oh my God,” Abby whispers, taking a step backward. She looks around, terrified that any moment one of them is going to come down the hall from the bedroom.

Silence all through the apartment.

She tiptoes to the door, and she slips out as quietly as possible.

“It’s nothing against us,” Mom said when Jonny moved out. “He just needs his space.”

Yeah, so he can get up to weird sex stuff with his girlfriend.  _Ugh._

Abby gets a cup of coffee nearby, and she comes back at nine-thirty. The living room is tidy, and Jon and Tish are both dressed and ready, apparently none the wiser that she was ever here.

Ten minutes later at Panoptic’s gym, Abby stands on the mats with her arms crossed, watching Jonny rearrange Tish’s stance.

“Forget about winning the fight,” he says, coming over to toe Abby’s feet a few inches farther apart. “That’s not the point. That’s not even in the same area code as the point.” He goes back to Tish and twists her hips to square them up. “You’re going to fight to survive.”

“How is that different?” Abby says, still bitter that she has been dragged into this at all.

“It means if you can run, you run. If you can’t, you raise the cost of attacking you higher than he’s willing to pay. So.” He mirrors their stances, and then he demonstrates a weird sliding pace forward and back. “First you’re going to learn how to move.”

Tish treats it like learning a new dance style, picking up the forms fast and then combining and recombining them like a natural. But there is no real purpose behind her punches, and Jonny keeps saying things like, “You make it look really pretty, but remember you’re trying to hurt me here.”

Abby, on the other hand, takes to martial arts like a duck to particle physics. She throws awkward, hesitant jabs and nearly apologetic uppercuts. After an hour, she has sweated through her clothes and achieved absolutely nothing.

“Okay, this is not my thing,” she announces.

Jonny’s face falls. “But you’ve barely gotten started.”

“I don’t think I could make this my thing even if I crazy-desperately wanted it to be my thing,” she says, walking off the mat for her water bottle. “Which I don’t.”

He looks mildly offended, crossing his arms and watching her take a seat on the sidelines. “So that’s it?”

She stretches out across the bench and lets her arms dangle. “That’s it.”

Jon and Tish will probably enjoy themselves more without her here anyway. Yes, sure, Jonny, teach your girlfriend martial arts. You’ll need a very hands-on approach, obviously. How will she know what to do with her hips if you don’t grab them and show her?

“What’s got you in a snit?” Mom says when Abby gets home.

“I’m not in a snit.”

“Okay, what’s got you doing a remarkable impression of my daughter in a snit?”

Abby sighs. “I have homework to do.”

She goes upstairs, and she doesn’t do her homework.

 

Because February has not yet sucked enough, Dad’s favorite reporter Jolie Page publishes a ten-page article titled,  _We Call Him The Arrow_.

It is the most complete account of his history and probable identity the Star Herald has ever run.

“At least three men have worn the famous hood,” Page begins. “They have all been extremely accomplished marskmen, free runners, and martial artists. Only the first is known to have killed anyone.”

She goes on to profile various suspects over the years. Dad she dismisses with a few carefully chosen words conveying her polite disbelief that Captain Lance ever took party boy Ollie Queen so seriously back in the teens.

She spends more time on a loose cannon cop who was kicked off the force back in the twenties and who is some kind of eccentric recluse now. Then she dwells at length on the Arrow’s apparent connection to the Lance family and now to the District Attorney’s office, which brings her to Ted Grant, Laurel’s ex-husband. She lavishes detail on his history as a fighter and his work with troubled youth. Just as an illustrative example of the young men he mentors, Page profiles Cornell Hunt, who is a few years older than Jonny and whose arrest record is much more violent.

Dig gets a closer look than he probably deserves, because he was once questioned in connection to Dad’s arrest. Even Jonny gets a mention, with his martial arts training thrown in as an absolutely non-libelous point of interest.

She tops it all off with an “intriguing new theory” that the Arrow is, in fact, a mercenary who settles gang disputes or commits corporate sabotage for hire. Page has noticed that every time he sinks a company with fraud allegations or scandal, some private investor makes a killing. This pattern goes all the way back to the Arrow’s first known “corporate hit” in 2012. “Someone always profits,” she writes, and she even faintly implies that a few of Dad’s friends from QC, Kord Industries, and the Bank of Starling may have employed the Arrow at some point.

“You hopeless, innumerate moron,” Mom seethes. “Is it so hard to grasp that, with a large enough pool of investors betting both ways, someone is going to get lucky?”

“She thinks she’s identified a pattern,” Dad says wearily. “It’s not even the stupidest theory about the Arrow that I’ve heard.”

“People who do not understand finance, statistics, or the business world should either shut up, or stop trying to think without assistance.”

No one is as pissed off as Jonny.

“Time to order a new training dummy,” Mom sighs.

Page’s article sparks an editorial war among the kind of people who write editorials. But not everyone is throwing in to attack or defend the city’s icon.

“There have been multiple Arrows over the past thirty years,” one Star Herald reader writes in, “and in the unlikely event that SCPD finally gets its act together and catches the current one, another will probably pop up in his place. The current debate is not unlike a referendum on whether to abolish the recent freezing temperatures.”

Abby’s English teacher often takes his inspiration from current events, and tomorrow he plans a class debate. Arrow: hero or menace?

“I’m going to say menace,” Abby tells her family at dinner. “Big green terrifying menace.”

Dad nods solemnly. “I hear he uses  _violence_.”

“Which never solved anything,” Mom adds primly.

But ten minutes into drafting an argument that characterizes Dad and Uncle Roy and Jonny as dangerous lunatics, Abby sets her glassbook aside. “Screw this.”

In third period the next morning, Mr. Troubridge tells the pro-Arrow team to move their desks to the right and the antis to the left. Backpacks rustle and chair legs screech across the floor, and in two minutes every desk but one crowds the right side of the room. Abby sits in the middle, chin propped on her fist.

Mr. Troubridge looks them over. “All right, I’m going to need a few volunteers to play devil’s advocate here. Mr. Richards, Ms. Tran, if you could pick six more people and move your desks, please. Ms. Queen, go ahead and join them.”

Jason Richards, who found Abby good enough to kiss but not to date, raises his hand and says, “Could we maybe not?”

Mr. Troubridge raises his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

Jason jerks his head at Abby. “I know you’re not From Here, but, um, the Arrow saved her life freshman year.” He shrugs uncomfortably. “If you make me stand up and argue that he belongs in prison, I’m going to feel like kind of an asshole.” He realizes what he just said, and adds a hasty, “Sir.”

Mr. Troubridge’s mouth falls open slightly.

Abby clears her throat. “I was going to sit this one out on the grounds of insurmountable bias.”

Mr. Troubridge closes his mouth. Licks his lips. “Get out your copies of Paradise Lost, and let’s resume our discussion of Eve’s characterization.”

After rehearsal that night, Abby comes home and leans her head in the door of Mom’s office.

“Who won?” Mom says, looking up from the green map blinky that is Jonny.

“Pretty sure I did,” Abby says. “I’m really tired, okay? Just came to say hi before bed.”

Mom holds out her cheek to be kissed. Abby obliges her, and she heads down the hall with the sound of heroics behind her.

“So he’s not our guy?  Well, I hate to say I told you so, but I did kind of tell you. Oh my God, could you please watch your mouth? I don’t want to hear stuff like that from you. Gross.”

“We call him the Arrow,” Abby chuckles, and she slips into her room.

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

On the first warm night in March, Abby wakes without knowing why.

The house feels emptier than it should, as it often has since Jonny moved out. Dad is away at some convention or other, but his absence does not account for the heavy, still feeling in the air.

She wanders down the hall, Percy on her heels, and finds Mom crying in her home office.

A bolt of fear roots Abby’s feet to the floor. Bad news in this house is not like bad news in other houses. “Mom?”

Mom looks up, and her face just sort of crumples. She holds out an arm. “Come here, junebug.”

Numbly, Abby permits herself to be folded into a hug. Mom doesn’t even fuss when Percy plops himself down at her feet and leans against her legs. “Is Jonny ok?”

“Yes,” Mom says quickly, as if she has just realized how this must look. “He’s - he’s not hurt or anything.”

Something else, then. Abby twists her neck to look at the automatic transcription from the police radio scrolling down Mom’s glassbook, and words jump out at her. Timestamped an hour ago:

_…found two in the back bedroom. Coroner should be here any second. Keep the rookie on the sidewalk._

_It’s his first fire. He’s going to have to see eventually._

_It’s kids, man._

_Copy that._

“There was a house fire?” Abby says, squeezing Mom back.

“Apartment building adjacent to, ah,” Mom sniffles. “Adjacent to some very nasty people. Some even nastier people tried to… We didn’t figure it out in time.” Then Mom lets go, sits back in her chair, and plucks a tissue from a box tucked into her desk drawer. Her eyes well up again when she says, “They found a brother and sister, seven and nine, who didn’t make it out. Smoke inhalation.”

Abby sinks her weight onto the desk. “Where’s Jonny?”

Mom looks away. “He said he needed a drink, and he left.”

“He couldn’t have done anything.” Abby bites her lip. “Could he?”

“We didn’t even know the kids were there. He got three people out, and I borrowed the HVAC sensors to sweep for heat signatures, but…” Mom grimaces. “Fire.”

Reflexively, Abby’s imagination shows her a room flickering red and filling with smoke - and she closes her eyes. She doesn’t need to think about that any harder, thank you.

“Their mother…” Mom says, and wipes her nose again. “God, I can’t imagine anything worse.”

All Abby can offer is, “I’m so sorry.”

Mom pulls her back into a hug, gives her a good solid squeeze, and then just holds on for a long, long time.

An hour later, Tish brings Jonny home. His arm across her shoulders is the only thing keeping him upright as he stumbles to the stairs, quiet and morose as he never is when he is drunk. Slow and clumsy, she gets him up to his room.

“Feel kind of sick,” Mom and Abby hear him say at the end of the hall.

“All right, let’s get you taken care of.”

Mom sighs, watching his bedroom door close behind them. Then she reaches for Abby and tugs her toward the master bedroom. “You mind sleeping in here tonight?”

“I don’t mind. What about Percy?”

Mom makes a moue, thinking it over, and then finally she says, “Percy too.”

Mom and Dad’s California king bed has always been plush with too many pillows and sheets so soft that Mom jokes they’re woven from unicorn hair. Dad claims to have shot the unicorn himself, and Mom rolls her eyes and says, “It wasn’t funny the first time, Oliver.”

With a few pillows and some expertly bunched-up blankets, Mom and Abby make a nice little nest in the middle. Percy curls up at the foot, after a few unsuccessful attempts to nose his way between the ladies.

“Oliver should talk to him when he gets home,” Mom says, squishing a pillow into shape.

Abby tugs the down comforter over them both. “You think Dad can talk him out of feeling guilty?”

“No. But he can remind him that he’s not alone.”

“He wasn’t.” Abby holds her spread thumb and forefinger up to her cheek to mimic the headset. “You were in his ear the whole time.”

Mom shakes her head. “I was on the comm with Dad when he raided a human trafficking operation once. There was someone we missed, and SCPD found her body a few days later. When we realized where she’d been hidden, he took it really hard. He’d been standing right on the other side of a wall from her.”

“I’ve heard him tell Jonny that, ah, that sometimes you lose.” Lose seems like understatement to the point of disrespect, but that mental thesaurus is too heavy to pull down from the shelf right now. “I never knew details.”

Mom rolls onto her back, and she frowns at the ceiling. “It’s different, being the one who was actually there.” Her hands flutter vaguely over stomach. “Boots on the ground, or whatever it’s called. Oliver said he couldn’t stop thinking about that wall between them. Wondering if she yelled, and he didn’t hear.”

It’s not difficult to see that woman has stayed with Mom all these years too, boots on the ground or no. Abby opens her mouth to say something, and if she were a better person maybe she could manage empathy or an attempt at wisdom. But the first thing that floats to mind is,  _What the hell possessed you people to do this?_

She sighs heavily, sinking deeper into the pillow nest. “I wish it had gone differently. Both times.”

Mom looks over at her, brow still furrowed. “Go back to sleep, junebug.” She reaches over and tucks a section of hair behind Abby’s ear. “And thank you.”

“For what?”

Mom tucks her hand under the pillow and stretches out comfortably. “Just thank you.”

 

 

Dad talks to Jonny. Whatever he says, it does not help.

The Arrow spends the next two weeks singlemindedly tracking down every gang member even tangentially culpable for that fire and dragging them to Hall, occasionally with a few extra holes in them. A few sleepless nights into this project, Mom can no longer hide the dark circles under her eyes with makeup, and she is gobbling her migraine meds preemptively. Abby overhears her one night, crawling into Dad’s lap on the sofa. “I’m not twenty-five anymore, Oliver. I can’t live on caffeine and cat naps.”

“So don’t,” he says firmly. “Sit tonight out.”

“He’ll suit up without me.”

Dad is silent, which Abby finds suspicious.

“What are you going to do?” Mom says, peering up at him. “Take his bow and arrows away?”

Instead, Dad sighs. “I miss baby gates and playpens.”

Mom makes a little humming noise. “Remember when I put him on a leash at the zoo?”

“Simpler times.”

That night, Dad calls Jonny for a stern talk about things like “running your mother ragged” and “Do you want to trigger her headaches again?”

Silence. Hovering outside the door of his study with chamomile tea, Abby thinks for a moment that Dad has hung up. She is about to knock when he says quietly, “Is it really them you’re trying to punish, Jon?”

Then Abby hears a sigh and the tap of a phone set down on a hard surface.

She knocks, and not for the first time she and Dad have midnight tea and toast. They talk school and college tours and Princeton Review, and after a little while Dad smiles and says, “You’ve been better lately.”

Abby shrugs. “The sun came out. That helps.”

“You put the work in,” he insists. “With the therapist, for one, but also with trying every kind of exercise known to man.”

She chuckles. “Yeah, but I hated them all except dance rehearsals.”

“You could come learn a few simple exercises with free weights,” he says, one hand reaching vaguely for the tea tray. “Offer’s still open.”

She slides the strawberry preserves closer to him. “That doesn’t sound like my thing.”

He shrugs. “You never know. Feeling strong in one way might help you feel strong in others.”

Dad is kind of the sweetest. So much so that she might get a bit verklempt if they keep talking about this, so instead she says, “Is Jonny going to be all right?”

Oh, that was a downer. Dad’s gentle smile disappears, and he sets his Panoptic mug down carefully. “I thought he might take it this way.”

“What way?”

“People joke about how much he takes after me, but really he’s his mother’s son.” Dad leans back in his chair with a sad sort of smile. “He has her heart, just like you do.”

Abby frowns in confusion.

“Mom believes in people even when they don’t deserve it. She sees the good in the world, no matter how much bad it’s buried under. And I think it hurts her more when the world disappoints her.”

Abby swings her feet. “I guess she is pretty sunshiney.”

“Jon’s the same way.”

Abby raises an eyebrow.

“No, really,” Dad says, smiling. “He had a hard time wrapping his head around the Hand’s trafficking operation and Cuvier’s experiments - the idea that people could do that to each other. He thought he could pluck out the bad apples, and SCPD would be fine. He was offended on a personal level by the officers who didn’t live up to their badges.” Dad uncrosses his arms, and he comes to sit next to her on the sofa. “You could mistake it for innocence or naivete if you didn’t know any better. That’s not what it is.”

“It’s faith.”

Dad smiles, because Jonny doesn’t think much of that word. “It literally means believing in shit for no reason,” he once told Mom after several Old Fashioneds. “Doesn’t that sound like the worst idea ever? But call it faith, and everybody is nodding at each other like, ‘Sure. Faith. Fuck, yeah.’”

Mom’s face fell, and she abandoned her gentle attempt to get him to come to synagogue.

“You could call it that,” Dad says. “But maybe don’t tell him so.”

Abby smiles back, and then she furrows her brow at him. “You think I’m like that too?”

He laughs, as if it should be obvious.

She crosses her arms. “I take pills to make sure I can see anything good in the world at all.”

He nods, rolling his lips together, and he takes his time thinking over the next words out of his mouth: “I’m afraid that’s my demon you’re fighting. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

He looks her in the eyes. “Despair.”

She sits up a little straighter at the formality of the word, at how gently he says it. Four years of therapists and psychiatrists have given her names and labels for the ways her brain betrays her, but Dad has obviously put some thought into that word. It doesn’t come from the DSM-VII. It’s poetry, or maybe prayer.

“I’ve never called it that before,” she says quietly.

Dad looks away. “Someone once asked me if I knew what my sin was. He seemed to think that was it.”

“Someone?”

“He’s been dead for a long time.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” With neither shame nor pride, just a bitter quirk to his mouth, Dad says, “I killed him.”

“Oh,” Abby says in a voice pitched rather higher than she intended. “I’m sure he was a… very bad man.”

Dad’s head tips forward so slowly she can’t tell if he is nodding or bowing his head. “I have plenty of regrets. Can’t say he’s one of them.”

“But you kind of took it to heart.” Abby wilts a little bit under the power of Dad’s eyes when they meet hers, and she feels like she should clarify: “What he said about despair being - being your sin. I mean, you remembered. After all this time.”

“I guess I did.”

Abby swallows back everything she wants to say, everything it would hurt him to ask. Things like, Can’t I have somebody else’s demon, please? Because I think maybe there has never been a time, as far back as anyone can remember, when you weren’t a little bit broken. You did terrible things, and you’re still paying for them after all these years. You’re so proud of Jonny it might choke you, but if he dies in that hood, you will never, ever forgive yourself. None of that can possibly be healthy or sane.

What she says instead is, “So, um. Do we ever win?”

Dad looks her in the eyes again. “You win every day you get up and fight.”

So no. This never ends.

Like a mind-reader, Dad bumps her shoulder and says, “It gets easier.” Then he scoots her closer to his side and drapes his arm around her. “Since the day you were born, you’ve made it easier.”

She leans into him on a sigh. “Does everyone at City Hall know you’re a marshmallow?”

“They’d better not. I need to bully them into passing a budget next month.”

“I won’t tell.”

He shrugs. “Who’d believe you?”

 

 

It is May, and Jonny is not himself.

He has always been an affectionate drunk, and the more vodka you get in him, the more likely he is to hang off your neck telling you how awesome you are. Dad pretends to find this tiresome. Mom actually objects, but only because, “Sweetheart, you are heavy.”

But lately, Jonny has downed more straight whiskey with dinner than anyone is quite comfortable with, and it has done no favors for his mood. Two weeks ago, he sniped at Dad about “your pet judge and his dumbshit clerk” who did something of questionable legality that Abby couldn’t quite follow. Last Thursday he picked a fight with Laurel over the Bradley case, whatever that was, and how her office “screwed that pooch sideways.”

He once came close to his usual drunken cuddliness, but it was by hugging on Tish in public past the point of embarrassment. “Sweetie,” she said quietly, which the whole family long since decoded as,  _Listen up, because I am dead serious right now_. “Not here, please.”

His attitude turned chilly, and they hardly spoke for the rest of the night.

“He’s about as grumpy as you were when we met,” Mom tells Dad, sinking into the throw pillows on the sofa.

He pulls her calves across his lap and rests his arms over them. “I’ve tried talking to him. Haven’t gotten very far.”

Not long after school lets out, Jon and Tish have their first big fight.

Apparently, Tish received a death threat, and not one of the run of the mill, “die, demonspawn” threats she has been receiving since her father’s crimes became public knowledge. This one was a credible threat, complete with accurate information about her class schedule and which campus lot she parked her car in.

She told campus police and SCPD, but she did not tell Jonny.

Sitting awkwardly in the dining room, scooting broccoli around their plates, the whole family has a hard time hearing Tish’s half of the conversation one room away in the kitchen. Jon’s half comes through as clearly as if he were standing at the head of the table.

“That seems like the kind of thing I should know, don’t you think?”

Murmur.

“Didn’t want me to - Tish, I worry about this shit for a living!”

Mom takes a deep breath, turns to Laurel, and says, “Have you heard from Sara lately?”

“Yes,” Laurel says, over Jonny demanding to know what the hell Tish was thinking. “She says she’s trying to pick up Turkish, and it’s not going well.”

Aunt Thea forces a smile, passing the water pitcher to Dad. “That would make five languages, if she managed it, wouldn’t it?”

In the kitchen, Jon’s voice rises. “Because we’re supposed to be in this together, for fuck’s sake!”

Laurel smiles pleasantly. “Six.”

Abby nods appreciatively. “Oh, wow.”

“You guys,” Aunt Thea says, tossing her napkin on the table and shaking her head at Laurel and Abby. “This is a valiant effort, but - ”

“Then you’re with the wrong fucking guy!”

Dead silence all through the house.

A door slams.

Mom twists around to blatantly stare at the doorway. “Oh, crap.”

Dad rubs his temples. Then something crashes in the kitchen, and he looks up sharply.

Jonny comes storming down the hall, passes the dining room doorway, and notices everyone staring at him.

“Shit,” he mutters. “You heard all that.”

“Just you,” Dad says, raising his eyebrows. “Your voice carries.”

Jonny rolls his eyes hard and keeps walking. “Sorry to ruin the evening.”

“Did you just break something in our kitchen?” Mom calls after him.

“I’m going to get a broom,” he says in a tightly controlled voice as he stalks away.

Dad glances toward the back of the house, where Tish has probably disappeared out to the veranda or the garden. “Does someone want to…?”

Aunt Thea gets to her feet. “I’ll check on her.”

After that, everyone politely pretends nothing happened, and they finish dinner.

An hour later, Abby is at her desk, deep in her chem homework, when Jonny shuffles into her room and flops down on her bed.

“Was I kind of an asshole?” he asks the ceiling.

Kind of? “You yelled at her and said fuck a lot.”

He looks genuinely surprised, and he seems to believe himself when he says, “I didn’t yell.”

She is tempted to roll her eyes. But Jonny once told her a story about a gang member who screamed graphically obscene threats in his face the whole time the Arrow tied him up, so perhaps his threshold for yelling is higher than normal people’s. All she can say is, “If you talked to me like that, I’d feel like you were yelling at me.”

He rolls face down and lets out a muffled groan into her comforter.

“You could go apologize.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”

“Probably because you yelled and said fuck a lot.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She takes a long time to think about this before she says it. Finally she decides it might be worth saying. “Have you ever thought through what happens if you don’t come home one night?”

Startled, he turns over enough to look her in the eyes. Then he rolls his lips together. “After Selby’s traumatic brain injury,” he says cautiously, “I drew up every legal document I could think of, yeah.”

“No, I mean…” She rearranges in her desk chair. “I mean Mom and Dad spend the rest of their lives wondering what they could’ve done differently. It would - Jonny, it would break them. And I’m not exactly famous for my emotional stability, you know?” She takes a deep breath. “What I mean is, it’s not just you out there. You’re risking our whole family. Every time.”

There is guilty resignation but no surprise in his face. “Yeah,” he says softly. “I’ve thought that through.”

She has to look away while the rush of fury subsides. “Oh. Okay, then.” She takes another deep breath before she meets his eyes. “It’s not like we ever sat down and took a vote.”

He sits up, still holding her gaze. “No, I guess not.”

“I told you, I won’t ask you to stop. But if other people want to play roulette with their own safety, you are the last person who gets to freak out on them for not asking your permission.” She squares her shoulders. “I mean, the absolute last person.”

He sits up straighter on her bed. “I have a job to do. It’s not like I don’t wear body armor and train for that shit every day. I don’t take stupid risks for no reason.”

Wow, that last sentence breaks exciting new ground in the field of verbal irony. But neither “I’m impressed that you can say that with a straight face” nor “Oh my God, you absolute dumbass” will advance this conversation. Instead she steals shamelessly from her therapist and says, “She has a reason, Jon. Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s stupid.”

“Fine,” Jonny says on a sigh. Then he holds up his hands in surrender. “You know what? I’m going to get out of your hair.”

And here she thought she sounded so calm and reasonable and not at all annoyed. “Out of my hair?”

“You called me Jon,” he mutters, getting to his feet. “That means you’re just about done with me.”

Oh. Good point.

“God, you look like Dad when you’re pissed,” he says wearily, reaching for the doorknob. “It’s weird as hell. I’ll see you later, okay?”

But no one in this family parts angry. That’s the rule.

His shoulders bunch up in surprise when she comes at him sideways for a hug. Then he relaxes, and he gets an arm around her shoulders.

“You’ll work it out,” Abby says.

“Yeah.” He pats her arm, gives her a squeeze, and releases her. “Night.”

When he’s gone, she sits back down to her homework.


	6. Chapter 6

“Text us when you get settled in,” Dad says in the departures lane at the airport, giving Abby one more hug.

After a long few seconds, he still has not let go. She pats his back. “Dad, it’s only eight weeks.”

“Right,” Mom says, getting in on the other side of the hug. “Only the entire summer.”

The young artist program at Gotham University’s School of Performing Arts packs two shows into that short space of time, which means Abby will be rehearsing too hard to miss anyone. Nevertheless, she promises to call and email.

“Don’t forget to give Mrs. McGinnis her thank-you gift,” Mom calls after her one last time as she wheels her luggage through the automatic doors.

From the moment the cab crosses the bridge into Gotham and Abby gets her first good look at the city lights, she cannot stop smiling. Brilliant light coexists with deep shadow - sleek new public transit with centuries-old architecture - noise and haste with steady permanence. It is strange and beautiful, and it is hers for eight weeks.

“Come in, come in!” Mrs. McGinnis says, smiling wide as she opens the apartment door.

Mrs. McGinnis was very insistent on hosting her. “Your family practically adopted Terry for four years. Please let me return the favor for a summer.” She seems genuinely pleased to be rolling Abby’s luggage into the apartment.

She leads Abby down the hall to a small room with a plain twin bed. Framed posters cover the walls, and Abby recognizes none of the names or faces. Son House, Muddy Waters, Miles Davis.

“Matt’s home for the summer, so I’ve put you in Terry’s room,” Mrs. McGinnis says. “Everything is clean and laundered, and I Febrezed the hell out of it, I promise.”

Abby pauses at the threshold. Of course it makes perfect sense - where did she think she’d be sleeping? But she was not quite prepared for the idea of sleeping in Terry’s bed.

Next Mrs. McGinnis leads Abby into the kitchen, where lounging against the counter is -

Abby’s insides go a bit wibbly.

But, no. It isn’t Terry. Too short, too stocky, and on this face the striking angularity of Terry’s features is softened to boyishness. “You must be Matt.”

“Abigail Queen.” He grins broadly and offers his hand. “I have heard absolutely everything about you. Don’t think you can fool me.”

She smiles back and accepts the firm, businesslike handshake. “I heard you once woke Jonny and Terry up with a super soaker. I’ve been waiting to shake your hand.”

He puts her to work slicing tomatoes, and within two minutes he has her talking animatedly about the young artist program. Within three minutes, she is fairly certain that Matthew Riordan McGinnis could sell water to fish.

Terry arrives not long afterward, as promised, and he greets Abby with “Hey, kiddo” and a bear hug.

“So good to see you,” she says with perfect equanimity, going up on her toes to hug him back. “What happened to your wrist?” Whatever comes out of his mouth next is going to be a lie, but to ignore the brace would look rude in front of his family.

“Repetitive strain thing. From work.” It is exactly the kind of technical truth Jonny used to employ.

Terry’s mother clucks about the hours Mr. Wayne requires, and Abby hopes to God she does not look as awkward as she feels. She knows the single most important thing about Terry, and his own family does not. How is that fair?

They sit down to dinner, and Terry rags on Matt exactly the same way he does Jonny. That, more than anything else, puts Abby at her ease. By dessert, she is joining in. Terry teases her right back, and she hopes the warmth in her cheeks is not showing up bright pink.

Laying in bed that night, in Terry’s room that still smells of him beneath the Febreze, Abby squeezes her eyes shut tight and whispers into the dark: “I am going to get over this stupid crush in three… two… one…” She opens her eyes. “Done. I’m over him.”

Above the desk, Miles Davis looks skeptical.

“No, seriously.” She wiggles down deeper into the mattress. “I feel so much better already.”

Over the next few weeks, the McGinnises take Abby to do all the fun touristy things, and she begins to get weak in the knees. She feels light as a feather. Before she knows it, she’s walking on air.

Not over Terry, thank you very much. No, it is Gotham that has her twitterpated.

It is familiar enough - an old port city with a beautiful mishmash of cuisines and architecture and music. It has a guardian angel prowling the rooftops, just like at home. Matt is ridiculously proud of him, and one weekend he takes Abby on a two-hour tour of historically significant locations connected to the Dark Knight.

But this city is not Starling. It is bigger and louder and faster, and though there is real kindness here, it is wrapped in brusqueness. No one recognizes her on the street or says a casual hello. No one nods acknowledgment as they pass in the park. No one gives a damn whose daughter she is, and even if they knew they would not be impressed. She can lose herself in the street lamps and neon as easily as into a stage light.

“I see why you love it so much,” she tells Terry at dinner one night.

The smile he gives her is not his usual cocky grin. It is the quiet pride she sometimes sees in Dad’s eyes, when Starling has surpassed herself once again. “Thanks.”

She does not see much of him otherwise.

“Mr. Wayne keeps him so busy,” Mrs. McGinnis explains with a grimace when Terry misses a trip to the Empire State Building.

“He flaked again, huh?” Matt says. “Surprise, surprise.”

Abby cannot meet their eyes.

At the School of Performing Arts, she works harder than she has ever worked in her life. “You’re still overpowering the altos here, sopranos. Watch it, you’re going flat when the tempo slows. Someone show Abby the pas de bourree again. I know you’re not a dancer by training, but try and keep up.”

She gets out of rehearsal long after dark to discover her phone has blown up.

 _hope you are doing well_ , says Dad. _Call your mother, she misses you_

 _Just saw Aida opens the last week you’re there_ , Mom says. _Let me know if you want tickets. Don’t forget to take your meds. Maybe call Dad when you get a chance? He had a rough day. Love you junebug_

Tish has left her a voicemail, suggesting a few more places she might want to visit. Jon has called three times and left no messages of any kind.

Abby calls Mom’s phone on the way home, and she gets both her parents, as she knew she would. “What are you guys up to?”

“Honestly?” Mom says on speaker. “Crying into our wine because our babies are gone and the house feels so empty.”

“You suffer.”

“We do.”

“How is the program going?” Dad asks, and in just one sentence Abby can tell he is exhausted. He will not be terribly chatty tonight then.

She makes up for his quiet with probably too much detail, and Mom asks for even more. That is how Abby finds herself telling them, “and this city, it’s just _amazing_. Sometimes I think I could really see myself here, you know?”

In the brief silence that follows, a perfectly clear picture pops into her head of Mom casting a worried glance at Dad, whose expression changes not at all.

“It sounds incredible,” Mom says warmly.

“I mean, it’s not home,” Abby says a little too quickly. “It’ll be nice to be back in a few weeks.”

Very gently, Dad says, “Baby, we want you to enjoy it.”

That’s the thing - she really does.

In Gotham, she can be anyone she wants.

 

 

 

One Saturday morning, Terry quirks a smile at her and says, “Hey, my boss wants to meet you.”

Her eyes widen. “Bruce Wayne wants to meet me?”

“He knew your parents, back when. He just wants to say hi.” His grin broadens, and he statics up her hair with his fleece sleeve. “Come on. You’re not scared of the grumpy bath towels, are you?”

In the foyer of Wayne Manor, Abby turns on the spot to take in all its cold grandeur. In a nervous whisper, she says, “He lives alone in this big house?”

Before Terry can answer, an absolutely enormous Great Dane comes bounding down the hall. He leans affectionately against Terry’s hip, accepting a few strokes to his sleek back, and then he starts sniffing suspiciously at Abby, who politely offers the back of her hand.

“Chill, buddy,” Terry says. “She’s not here for your Fancy Feast or whatever.”

“Ace,” a deep, gravelly voice orders from the parlor. “Come here.”

The dog practically teleports into the next room. Terry follows at a more sedate pace, and Abby trails in his wake.

Seated in a wingback chair in a patch of sunlight, with a blanket over his lap and a cane leaning against a nearby table, Bruce Wayne inclines his head to them. Ace sits at attention next to him.

Abby has been thinking of this man and Dad as nearly contemporaries, but in person Mr. Wayne looks ancient and much more forbidding. In a rumbling voice that seems at odds with his words, he says, “Abigail. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

She almost feels like she should curtsy. Instead she fidgets with the strap of her purse. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Wayne.”

He makes a courtly gesture to the sofa nearby, and Terry and Abby have a seat. She puts her hands at her sides, then in her lap, then at her sides. Terry gives her a look and covers her hand before she can move it again.

Mr. Wayne clears his throat, and she jumps. “Your parents are well?”

“Very.”

“And you’re enjoying Gotham?”

She does not have to feign enthusiasm when she says, “Oh, I love it here.”

Mr. Wayne does not smile, but the corners of his thin lips twitch very faintly. In a voice a half degree warmer than before, he says, “Why is that?”

And she tells him.

They visit for over an hour. Mr. Wayne keeps her cup full of coffee and her plate full of tiny sandwiches and pastries, and he asks brief, open-ended questions. After a while she finds herself sprawled comfortably on the sofa with Ace’s head in her lap, babbling away about everything she has done and seen in his city, telling him about Gotham as if he does not already know.

“Thank you for coming,” Mr. Wayne says at last. “Tell Oliver and Felicity hello for me.”

“I will, sir. Thank you for having me.”

Terry herds her to the door, and he is smirking to himself a little bit.

“I talked too much, didn’t I?” she says as soon as they get in his car. “I can’t believe how much I talked. Why did you let me talk so much?”

He chuckles. “I knew he’d like you.”

“Like me? He didn’t crack a single smile!” She sinks lower in the passenger seat under a wave of embarrassment. “I’m sure he didn’t invite me so he could listen to me babble.”

“Inviting you might have been my idea,” Terry admits.

She peers through her fingers at him.

“The old man doesn’t get a lot of visitors, and mostly he likes it that way. But he also doesn’t get a lot of chances to be nice to people, you know? And you’re easy to be nice to.” He puts the car in gear, and with his eyes on the road, he says, “Trust me. He liked you.”

That night, she tosses and turns in her borrowed bed, fighting the flutters in her chest. Finally she kicks off the covers and sits up, glaring around the room in a mood.

“Shut up,” she tells Miles Davis.

 

 

On her third to last morning in Gotham, a phone call interrupts Abby, Matt, and Mrs. McGinnis at breakfast. Mrs. McGinnis answers it, and slowly her expression changes.

“Jon, I’m going to put you on speaker,” she says, and lays the phone on the table.

The bottom drops out of Abby’s stomach. “Jonny?”

Her brother’s voice fills the little kitchen. “Hey, junebug. Matt. Do not freak out,” he says firmly. “Terry’s hurt, but he’s going to be fine. He’s already in surgery to fix his shoulder, which is tricky so it takes a while. But some re-gen and some physical therapy, and he’ll be good as new. His bike is in much worse shape than he is.”

“What about you, honey?” Mrs. McGinnis says.

“A little banged up, but I’m walking and talking.”

Abby does not like the sound of that.

On the way to the hospital, she cannot help thinking that she should have expected something like this. Every six or eight months, Jonny hops a last minute plane across the country to do something ridiculously dangerous. “Dumbass poked the Jokerz with a stick,” he’ll say. Or, “Waller cornered him into running a job for her, which is going to be exactly as much fun as it sounds like.”

Once, it was: “I don’t even know what’s going on, because he’s too freaked to tell me about it, and he says don’t come. The fuck does he think I’m going to do? Listen to him?”

Only twice did the Arrow’s presence in Gotham actually make the news, and both times it was explained away as a copycat, because he was also spotted in Starling the very same night.

“It’s a good thing Dad still fits in the suit,” Abby said.

“The man can definitely rock some leather pants,” Mom agreed.

Abby gave her some side eye.

“We’re married,” Mom said. “I’m allowed to appreciate him.”

On these team-up jobs, the boys are supposed to watch each other’s backs. That is the whole point, and it has worked beautifully over the past couple years. This is the first time it has all gone sideways.

Abby follows Mrs. McGinnis and Matt into a waiting room, where Jonny rises from one of the little sofas. His left arm hangs in a sling, a butterfly bandage spans the ridge of his eyebrow, and swollen bruises distort his left cheekbone.

He looks at Abby as if  it has been eight years rather than eight weeks, and he reaches for her with his good arm. “Hey, come here.”

Breathless in his rib-creaking hug, Abby says, “Is your arm broken?”

“Good to see you too, you little brat. Too busy to answer your fucking phone, huh? And yeah, three places.”

“I’m sorry.” Still trapped in the hug, she tips her head back to ask, “Is Terry out of surgery?”

“Another hour, maybe,” Jonny says, turning to Matt and Mrs. McGinnis. “Doctor just came by, said it’s looking good.”

Still a little shellshocked, the McGinnises greet Jonny rather mechanically, and all four of them sit down to wait. Jonny keeps Abby squashed against his good side on the sofa while Matt asks a million questions about the “motorcycle accident.” Abby stares at the muted television and listens to her brother lie.

“But he knows better,” Mrs. McGinnis says. “I can’t believe he’d be so reckless.”

“Really?” Matt says, raising an eyebrow at her and looking more like Terry than Abby has ever seen him. “I can.”

The moment the doctor summons the McGinnises for an update, Abby turns to Jonny and whispers, “What happened?”

“McGinnis went out for a Darwin Award.” Then he glances around as if he might be overheard, and he mumbles, “Saved my life.”

She is unlikely to get more out of him, so instead she looks at Mrs. McGinnis, who is nodding along red-eyed and earnest as the doctor talks, and at Matt, who stands with his shoulders hunched and arms crossed protectively in front of him. “You think maybe it’s time somebody told them the truth?”

Jonny blows air through his teeth. “Not our call.”

“I don’t get it.” She shifts in his grip. “Why let the people who love him think he’s a flake or a jerk or an idiot? Why let them walk around not knowing the single most important thing about him? You told me the truth, and nothing awful happened.”

“He thinks he’s protecting them,” Jonny says, tipping his head back on the sofa. “I’ve already gone a few rounds with him over this. You take the next, if you think you’ll do better.”

Abby fishes ibuprofen out of her purse. “Take two.”

Jonny swallows them dry, and he gives her another squeeze. “Wake me up if anything happens, okay?”

“You’ve got it.”

Within a few minutes, his swollen cheekbone makes him snore. Abby makes herself comfortable against his side, and she settles in for a long wait.

 

 

 

Terry is released from the hospital the next day, at the very same moment that Abby is onstage taking her final bows at Gotham University’s Tremain Theater. Jonny meets her at the side entrance with a fluffy bouquet of pink daisies, and as her cast-mates shuffle past, they try not to stare at his busted-up face.

“You got me flowers?” she says, and presses her lips together on a chuckle.

“Nah. These are from the McGinnises. They’re sorry they couldn’t be here.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Are you sorry you could?”

“Gonna level with you,” he says, pushing the daisies into her arms. “I fell asleep a few times. But you were amazing. I woke up for you, okay?”

She laughs, and she loops her arm through his good one. “Let’s go home and check on the wounded warrior.”

“I’m a wounded warrior,” he grumbles. “Who just sat through a musical. In a very small seat.”

She pats his arm. “You are big bunches of hero, yes.”

At the McGinnises’, they find Terry sitting up on the sofa for a game of Monopoly with his mother and brother. His sling looks even more heavy-duty than Jonny’s, and his eyes are glassy with painkillers. He is losing badly, because as Matt says, “I just respect you too much to go easy on you, man.”

“You little shit,” Terry says, and throws a tiny silver top hat at him.

“Boys,” Mrs. McGinnis says wearily.

Abby sits down next to him and fusses over him a little bit, because someone should. Jon falls asleep in the armchair, and Mrs. McGinnis herds him away to bed in Matt’s room. Abby assures everyone that she is happy to sleep on the sofa so Terry can have a real bed, and in a rare moment of seriousness Matt says he will be fine on the pull-out sofa in his mother’s room.

One by one, everyone heads to their nice soft mattress or nearest equivalent.

Terry is the last to leave. He shows Abby where to find an extra blanket, and he lingers in a drugged haze at the end of the sofa.

She probably will not see him again before she and Jon get on a plane tomorrow morning, so she tries her luck one more time. “So, that motorcycle accident,” she says quietly. “Are you ever going to tell me what really happened?”

Terry rolls his eyes. “Your brother’s a fucking moron, is what happened.” Then he adds, almost inaudibly, “Saved my life.”

Mystery for the ages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poster on Terry's wall is [this picture of Miles Davis](http://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Miles-Davis-1964-resize-3.jpg).


	7. Chapter 7

“Oliver,” Mom says, elbows on the kitchen island and face in her hands. “What is wrong with me?”

Dad looks up from trussing the chicken and exchanges a nonplussed glance with Abby, who sits cross-legged on the kitchen floor combing knots out of Percy’s fur. No one has brushed him for two months, and now she will have to clip away the mats behind his ears.

Then Dad looks back at Mom. “You’re going to have to help me out here. What are you talking about?”

Mom opens her mouth to explain, then closes it. She rolls her lips together and sets her ponytail swaying, shaking her head faintly. Finally she lays her head down and grumbles into her sleeves, “For starters, this morning I actually said, out loud, ‘Maybe it’s a good thing Jon broke his arm.’” She shakes her head into her folded arms. “That idea formed in my brain, turned into words, and left my mouth.”

There is a long pause, and then Dad ties off his knot and starts washing his hands. “You said it was a good thing it happened _now_ ,” he corrects gently, over the sound of running water. “He’s been powering through for months, and we’ve been trying to convince him to take a break. Now he has no choice.”

Abby pauses in her combing to frown at him. “What do you mean, power through?”

Dad grimaces and tosses the dish towel on the counter. “You know he’s been a little…”

 _A little bit of a dick?_ Abby does not say. On the floor next to her, Percy grunts in annoyance that the brushing has abruptly stopped.

“A little off balance,” is what Dad finally settles on.

“It was worse while you were gone,” Mom says, surfacing from her sleeves to give Abby a tired smile. “I think he missed you.” Then she lets out a heavy sigh, and she says, “So obviously a triple fracture was the best thing that could possibly happen to him.”

Mom is too used to her own badly phrased comments for this one to be her real worry. Abby buries her fingers in the thick fur of Percy’s scruff and offers up, “I’ll take a silver lining where we can get it.”

Mom looks up.

“And if this is a weird one, well, we’re kind of a weird family, aren’t we?” Abby tries. “Everybody except me is a vigilante, active or retired. That’s got to put us in, like, the top one percent of weirdness nationwide.”

“Top five percent, at least,” Dad mutters, sliding the roasting pan into the oven. He doesn’t set a timer, because he doesn’t need to. By some sixth sense, he will peek into that oven at exactly the right moment, and then the trussed chicken on its bed of root vegetables will come out golden and steaming and juicy and perfect. Abby suspects that sometime during his five years abroad, Dad stumbled across a minor demon and sold his soul for this talent.

Mom sucks in a lungful of air, closes her eyes, and blurts out all in one breath: “Tish wants to go undercover and help us swipe intel from the local Bratva which we really really need if we’re going to defang or counter-blackmail them and I might have told her she could.”

Both Dad and Abby straighten up to stare at her.

Mom opens her eyes to look back at Dad, looking very nearly but not quite guilty. “It’s dangerous, and I know she’s just a kid, and maybe I should have turned her down. But I think she can pull it off, and our next best option is… bloodier.”

Dad has gone on record with the opinion that conning bad guys is much more dangerous than just shooting them. He crosses his arms and looks extremely grumpy.

Abby’s brain spends two more seconds stuck on the weirdness of hearing twenty-two year old Tish described as “just a kid.” Then she catches up to _counter-blackmailing the Russian mob_ , and she tilts her head sideways and says, “Counter-blackmail?”

Mom grimaces. “They’ve got some seriously incriminating information on a public official. We thought we could either steal it back, or we could hold some of their secrets over their heads to force a truce.”

Abby glances at Dad, who is glaring at the kitchen cabinets.

She turns back to Mom. “Undercover how?”

“Well, that’s the bad part,” Mom admits.

Dad raises his eyebrows. “You haven’t told us the bad part yet?”

“Maggie and her girls would be our in,” Mom says. “They would get her into the building as a, um, prospect.”

Dad’s glower darkens. “Maggie, as in, Maggie Carter, the leader of the local branch of the Sex Workers’ Outreach Project? Maggie and those girls?”

“They’re starting to trust the Arrow, but not enough to risk crossing the Bratva themselves,” Mom says. “I’d volunteer, but a fifty-five year old mom is not… you know. In the target demographic.”

“She wants to pose as a member of one of the most vulnerable populations in this city,” Dad says, voice rumbling as low as Abby has ever heard it, “and waltz into the Bratva’s front door? And you want to help her?”

“Jon takes bigger risks all the time,” Abby points out, letting Percy rearrange with his head in her lap.

“And I spent a year preparing him for every one I could think of,” Dad says. “Tish is going in cold.”

“Not exactly,” Mom admits. “She’s been, um, working the phones for a while now.”

Dad and Abby both stare blankly at her again. The first thing that comes to Abby’s mind is a late night commercial for “Singles in your area!” featuring smiling blonde girls lounging in bed with phones pressed to their ears.

“No, not those phones!” Mom says quickly. “I meant she’s been helping me with the human side of hacking. It’s amazing how much you can convince people to tell you over the phone, if you come up with the right story and tug their heartstrings the right way.”

“When did she start doing that?” Abby says.

“Just after you left for the Young Artist Program. She’s really good at it.” Then she looks right at Dad, who looks… forbidding. Growly and grumpy and like he wants to pull out a gavel and start pounding the counter and forbidding things left and right.

“Oliver?” Mom says, and for the millionth time, Abby feels herself turn invisible. They seem unaware that they have this superpower - making the world gray out around them - and they probably could not help it even if they knew. “Is it awful I’m even considering this? I know it’s dangerous, but danger is what we do. We can protect her.”

“You know how I feel about undercover missions,” Dad says, with such gentleness that Abby is suddenly convinced there is a story there.

Her intuition is confirmed by the softness in Mom’s eyes when she says, “Yeah, I know. But she’s a much better actress than I was.”

Dad lowers his eyes and uncrosses his arms. “It’s not awful.” He glances back up at her. “And no, there’s nothing wrong with you for taking her up on it.”

Abby is not quite certain her opinion is welcome, but she tosses it in anyway. “With you guys watching her back, I almost feel bad for anybody who tries to hurt her.”

Mom smiles, but Abby is not joking. She saw Joseph Risdon’s face after Jonny was through with him.

“Okay,” Mom says, gathering herself. “All right, then.”

“I’m more surprised that Jon’s on board,” Dad says.

Mom winces.

“Oh. You haven’t told him yet.”

“You guys were a test run.”

Abby shakes her head - “Good luck” - and starts combing out the knots behind Percy’s elbow.

 

 

When Jonny's cast comes off, Mom tells him the plan.

He freaks out.

Mom and Tish spend a day attempting to persuade him, and then they tell him that they are running the mission with or without him, and he can either help or get out of the way.

“Fine,” he snaps at Tish eventually. “But you’re wearing a panic button, and we’re agreeing on a code word, and I’m calling in backup.”

The night of the mission, Abby helps Tish go through her closet for an appropriate dress, but even her little black dresses are too conservative. So Abby opens up her own closet.

“None of your clothes are going to fit me,” Tish says.

 _Not by your definition of “fit,” which is probably identical to my grandma Moira’s_ , Abby does not say. “Just try a few.”

The fourth dress Tish tries on looks about right, Abby judges. The fabric compresses a little in certain places, and in others it lifts. If Abby had Tish’s curves, she would not be shy about going to clubs looking like that.

“I’m not comfortable in this,” Tish says on a sigh, “but I guess I’m not supposed to be.”

Abby bites her lip. “Come on, let’s get you made up. We’ll make you look as different as we possibly can.”

Half an hour later, Abby follows her downstairs. Mom and Jonny are waiting in the foyer with Dad and Dig, who will be suiting up special for the occasion. When they get a good look at Tish, Abby’s parents and Dig all shift uncomfortably.

Jonny’s eyes go straight to her cleavage, and they stay there as she descends the stairs.

When her feet touch floor, Tish says, “It looks like the disguise will work exactly as intended.”

Jonny swallows hard, and he finally looks up at her face. “I don’t like this plan.”

Mom and Dad and Dig exchange glances, because they are obviously not crazy about it either.

Tish sighs. “Jon, we’ve been over this.”

He gestures to the dress, the blonde wig, the gaudy necklace, and the heavy makeup. “That was before I knew you were going to look like that.”

“The whole point is that none of them will be looking at my face.” Then she puts on the lower vocal pitch and the slight French accent she uses to imitate her mother: “They will remember nothing about me but the neckline and the accent.”

“No, I know exactly what they’re going to see.” He looks her over again. “Baby, you can’t run in those shoes.”

“At least not very fast,” she admits.

“You can’t hide a weapon in that dress. The material is too thin to be any protection at all. That loose hair looks like a handhold, and that necklace is a garrote.”

Abby blinks in surprise, because not for a moment as she helped Tish dress did she consider any tactical implications beyond looking the part. But she can tell by Dad and Dig’s expressions that everything Jonny just said is absolutely dead-on accurate.

Tish steps up to Jonny, runs her hands up his arms, and calls him what no one else calls him unless they are supremely annoyed with him: “Jonathan.”

“They’re predators,” he insists. “They’re going to see prey.”

“I know,” she says, just loud enough for Abby to hear. “That’s what they need to see for this to work.” Then she tells a little bit of a fib, as Abby knows from the way her hands shook too hard for the mascara wand: “I’m not afraid.”

“Well, I am, so can we please do literally anything else?”

Mom and Dad step up on either side of him, and Mom lays her hand on his shoulder. “I’m going to have eyes on everybody the whole time.”

Behind them, Dig nods agreement. “Anything goes even a little bit wrong, you and your dad and I bust in there in a half second. We’ve got this.”

Jaw tight and shoulders bunched, Jonny shakes his head and turns for the door.

Abby distributes cheek kisses, and the four of them leave quietly. From the window, she watches them out of sight, and then she takes up a post on the sofa with her glassbook.

She is still there an hour later when Aunt Thea slips in the front door with some story about how she left her sketchbook in the guest bedroom. She is obviously here to keep Abby company, as she swiftly proves by plopping down on the sofa next to her and flipping through the movie queue.

“Aunt Thea?”

“What’s up, junebug?”

“Dad speaks Russian, right?”

“Not very well anymore, but he used to be fluent.”

“And he did some shady stuff during those five years he was gone.”

Aunt Thea knows where this is going, so she just takes it there herself. “Yeah, he’s the one the Bratva is trying to blackmail.”

Abby rearranges to sit cross-legged. “Is that why Dad and Jonny are so freaked about this one? Like, it’s one thing to risk your neck for the greater good, but it’s something else if our family might personally benefit?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it, especially for Oliver,” Aunt Thea says. “God forbid somebody else should protect him for a change.”

Tentatively, Abby says, “Do you know what they have on him?”

Aunt Thea looks her in the eyes. “I don’t,” she says, and Abby believes her. “But he told me - _years_ after the fact, and only when he had to - just a fraction of what he had to do to survive when they had him in their debt. I don’t recommend asking him about it.”

There are very few questions Abby has been advised not to ask her parents. Please don’t press Mom about Cooper Seldon. I know you’re curious, but Dad has a hard time talking about the people who helped him escape the island. And now, don’t ask what he did for the Bratva.

“Should we watch _The Princess Bride_?” Abby says instead.

Aunt Thea chuckles. “Let’s change it up. Have you ever seen _Nornagest_? The dialogue is crap, but the costume design is drop dead gorgeous.”

“Let’s do it.”

Nornagest the deathless tells a great king of the deeds of his forefathers, and then he asks to be released from the toils of this world. He permits the candle of his immortality to be burned down to nothing, and the credits start to roll.

“Ok, no prize for screenwriting,” Abby says. “But the queen’s hair. And her dress!”

“I know, right?”

Mom and Dad come through the door, and both Abby and Aunt Thea immediately twist around.

“How did it go?” Abby says.

“Tish got me onto their servers, and we got what we needed,” Mom says, looking ready to fall into bed.

“And a few human traffickers have extra holes in them,” says Dad. The knuckles of both hands are bruised and bloody.

“Oh, no,” says Aunt Thea. “Something went sideways?”

“Just bad luck,” Dad says on a sigh. “Sometimes things don’t go to plan, especially when you have someone inexperienced in the field and a lot of emotions running high. We got it taken care of, and everyone’s fine.”

Dad speaks politician, so it takes a moment for Abby to mentally translate that to something like: _We had a hiccup, Tish faltered, Jon flipped his shit._ She twists her hands in her lap. “Where are Tish and Jonny?”

Mom ambles over to the stairs and leans on the banister. “Oh, he took her home,” she says blearily. “You know he gets all grabby when you scare him.”

Abby thinks of him squashing her in the waiting room at Gotham General, and she smiles.

“Come on,” Dad says, herding Mom upstairs. “Bed.”

“Yes, please,” she says, leaning back against his shoulder, and the world around them grays out again.

Abby exchanges a smile with Aunt Thea, and neither of them much minds.

 

 

The Bratva Thing, as Abby calls it in her head, must have scared Jonny pretty badly. He practically smothers Tish for the next couple of weeks.

For her part, Tish keeps inviting Abby absolutely everywhere with them. Come see this movie with us, come have dinner at his apartment, come to my friend’s concert. Abby can only assume Tish is inviting her as a buffer against Jonny’s hovering.

But the hypervigilance fades, just like it did after Tish’s poisoning two years ago. Jonny relaxes into the goofy brother Abby prefers, rather than the stone-faced bodyguard carefully keeping himself between the door and his girls.

But Tish keeps inviting Abby to be the third wheel.

The next time she suggests the three of them go to dinner together, Abby smiles and shakes her head. “Don’t invite me to things just because you feel guilty you’re, like, stealing my brother.”

Tish’s eyes widen, and she takes a seat on Abby’s bed.

“Oh, no,” Abby says, raising her hands. “That was a joke. Kidding, kidding, kidding.”

“I know, but let’s talk.”

“I’m sorry I said it.” They have avoided this conversation for ages. Let’s not do it now. “You’re not stealing him, I’m happy to share, it’s not a custody battle, and I’m not actually that petty. I swear.”

When Jonny and Tish first got together, for about three seconds, Abby managed to put on a very serious face and say, “What are your intentions toward my brother?”

But then she cracked up, and Tish threw a crumpled up piece of paper at her, and they went back to figuring out sine waves. This is really not a big deal.

Except Tish seems to think it is. Quietly she says, “First of all, I’ve loved you longer than I’ve loved him.”

Abby turns her head, regards Tish sideways, and narrows her eyes. “So you’re saying you do love me.”

Tish grabs a stuffed bunny from Abby’s bed and throws it at her head. It bounces off her shoulder instead, and Percy dives for it, eagerly brings it to Tish, and mashes it against her knees. For a long moment, she regards his doggy grin skeptically, and then she throws it all the way out into the hall.

Abby laughs, flopping down on the bed to the sound of claws scrabbling on hardwood. “Now you’re stuck. This is the song that never ends.”

“Abby?” Tish says quietly.

Abby’s smile turns quieter. “You know, as soon as I noticed you guys had an inside joke, I thought, hey, they’d be cute, and they’d be good for each other, and finally he’ll have a girlfriend I get along with. So I was rooting for you from the beginning.”

Tish nods, her lap full of doggy nose and slobbery bunny again. “With subtlety and discretion, yes.”

Abby smiles and rolls onto her stomach, and she takes over this end of tug-of-war with Percy. “I’m happy for you. I really am.”

“Thank you,” Tish says, reaching for a Kleenex to wipe the dog slobber off her hands. “But in all honesty...”

Abby braces herself.

“I wasn’t doing it for you. I’ve been worried about him,” Tish admits very quietly, folding the damp Kleenex rather more elaborately than necessary. Abby knows she will not be getting much more detail; whatever she knows of Jonny's personal problems, Tish keeps strictly between the two of them.

But Abby can take a few guesses. “You mean the burnout? I know he had a rough patch over the summer, but I never see him like that lately.” She has not noticed him drunk or surly, and every other word out of his mouth is not fuck or shit.

“Yes,” Tish says pointedly. “He’s better around you.”

Abby looks away. She yanks the bunny out of Percy’s mouth and sends it flying into the hall again.

Tish leans back on her palms. “How do you feel about oatmeal raisin this evening?”

“Oh, you know,” Abby says in a small voice. “As you wish.”

 

 

In the first snowfall of the year, Elaine Diggle gets married.

“‘Generally,’” Abby reads at the lectern, with several hundred eyes on her, “‘by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby.” She looks up from the text, because the rest she knows by heart. “‘But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.’”

Elaine and Jodie stand not far away, hands clasped tightly, right next to Jodie’s pastor and a simple white unity candle. They are both absolutely beaming at Abby. Elaine mouths, _Thank you_.

Abby takes one last glance around the church. Dig and Lyla are seated in the front row, fingers twined together, radiating pride. Not far away Dad wears the expression of attentive solemnity that he always wears to formal occasions. With a slightly damp smile, Mom jostles him playfully until she gets a smile out of him too.

Abby steps down from the lectern, and she resumes her place in the bridal party, right between Jonny and AJ. She notices Jonny has clasped his hands behind his back to hide his drumming fingers.

“Finally,” he says, clapping along with everyone else as Elaine and Jodie kiss for the first time as wife and wife. “Now we can go do the good part.”

That is how Abby ends up lounging at a candlelit table with Mom and watching Jonny bend Tish over his arm on the dance floor. He is a good dancer, if not quite as good as he thinks he is, and he makes Tish look like gravity can’t quite hold her. She leaps without hesitation into lifts, and falls readily into dips. “Show-offs,” Abby mutters.

Mom chuckles, then her eyes slide over to the brides, who are dancing much more sedately, Jodie’s head resting on Elaine’s shoulder.

“God, I love weddings,” Mom sighs happily.

Abby smiles, because she has seen pictures of Mom at every family wedding since Dig and Lyla remarried, smiling like it was the best day of her life. “You know, it’s funny. I’ve heard the story of how Dad proposed, but I never heard the part where you said yes.”

Mom chuckles. “Oh, it was very eloquent and heartfelt. It started with, ‘Are you being serious right now?’”

“He did kind of spring it on you.”

Mom shakes her head fondly. “The big jerk.”

Abby tsk-tsks. “Didn’t even have a ring for you. He could’ve at least gotten on one knee, so you knew he was for real.”

“We cleared that up pretty quickly. He was being very, very serious.” Mom swirls her wine glass and grimaces at the little legs sliding down the glass. “Things were a little, um, ‘Oh, God, oh, God, we’re all going to die’ at the time - ”

“Seems like that happened a lot.”

“With inconvenient frequency, yes.” Mom sets her wine glass down, and her eyes seek Dad, who is deep in conversation with AJ. “But Oliver said, ‘Whatever happens, I want to be your husband when it does.’”

Abby smiles in spite of herself. “Aww. Dad.”

Mom grins right back. “I know, right?”

“He’s a big squish.”

“The biggest and the squishiest.” She reaches for the bottle and pours herself some more. “I was still kind of taken aback, and I don’t even remember exactly what came out of my mouth. Something about love and hearts opening up and wanting to be his wife? It must have been really good, because he misted up.”

Abby puts a hand to her chest. “ _Dad_.”

Mom smiles, a little smug. “And then we made out and got married.”

“Like, right then?”

“Well, no. Like, six months later. You really can’t get Rabbi Glade to show up for an interfaith ceremony on shorter notice than that.”

“I was going to say. From the pictures, it looked like you had time to plan.”

“Thea had time, more like. She was still running Verdant back then, and she was a lean, mean, event-planning machine. She asked us what we wanted, and bam. Flowers exploded everywhere.”

“But that dress,” Abby says, because she has seen pictures of Mom in ivory lace, looking young and radiant and exactly like herself only moreso. “That was all you.”

Mom smiles at the floor. “That was one thing I wish I’d done differently. Mom was heartbroken I went dress-shopping without her. It would’ve been a disaster if I’d let her help, and we would have argued and then maybe not spoken to each other for a couple weeks. But it would’ve meant a lot to her.”

Abby leans over to bump Mom’s shoulder with hers. “You are totally coming with me to pick out my wedding dress.”

“Thank you, baby. But you know Aunt Thea’s going to make you one custom.”

Abby looks out on the dance floor, where Tish is pulling Dad onto the floor and Jon is laughing too loudly, picking up his drink again. “You think she’ll make one for Tish?”

Mom follows her gaze, and she grins. “I’m thinking lace. Very traditional. Big full skirt and, ooh, maybe a train. Flowers in her hair.”

They watch Tish twirl under Dad’s arm, and if Abby did not know for a rock solid fact that Dad was the Charlie Brown of the dance world, she would be really impressed with him right now. Tish back leads so well, he looks like he knows what he is doing.

“Maybe pearly magnolias in her hair,” Abby says.

Mom’s smile softens. “I was saving those for you, junebug.”

“Oh, I want to wear them too. But, you know.” Abby shrugs. “They could be her something borrowed.”

“You’re a good one.” Mom tugs her into a hug. “Good kid. I’m so glad I made you.”

“Yeah, me too, Mom.”

Mom releases her, then narrows her eyes at a little shriek on the dance floor. Jon has grabbed himself a bride to dance with, and Elaine is clinging to his shoulders and giggling. “What is he - did he just dip her?”

He did. And Abby wants to be next.

“Go,” Mom says. “Go have fun.”

As soon as Jonny sweeps Abby in for a dance, she smells the whiskey strong on his breath. “Hey, junebug.”

Just for a moment, she reconsiders the wisdom of letting someone this drunk fling her around the dance floor. But Jonny is disgustingly coordinated, just like Dad, and she trusts him not to drop her.

“You be the whirly. I’ll be the gig.” She lays her hand in his. “Okay. Whirl me.”

He does not drop her. But he does keep drinking.

Abby moves on to dance with Dig, who keeps looking around over her head to spot Elaine and Jodie.

“They’re pretty cute, huh?” Abby says, watching Jodie go up on tiptoe to peck Elaine on the mouth mid-dance.

“Of all the people Lainie’s ever dated,” Dig says with a smile, “I was rooting for that one.”

Abby laughs. “I hope my dad can say that about whoever I marry.”

“For the guy’s sake, I hope so too.”

Not long after that, Mom comes onto the floor to make Jonny sit down. “Come on, honey. You’re a little, um, enthusiastic there. I’m afraid you’re going to hurt somebody.”

Confronted with Mom’s Serious Face, Jon sets Elaine gingerly on her feet. “I don’t drop girls on the floor, Mom.” Then, struggling not to crack up at his own joke, he adds, “‘S wasteful.”

Mom grabs him by the arm. “Jonathan, you are drunk.”

“And you’re short.” He boops her nose. “But in the morning, I’ll be sober.”

Mom looks ready to smack him, and Elaine snatches his wrist out of the air and yanks his hand down. “Don’t do that to your mother.”

As soon as he realizes that no one is laughing along, his expression turns cold. “I’ll get out of your hair then.” He shakes free of both of them, and he stalks away.

“Everything all right?” Jodie says, coming over and slipping her arm around Elaine’s waist.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” Mom says, watching with a frown as Jonny sulks at a candlelit table, throwing back the last of his whiskey neat, and then as Laurel sits down next to him. Then Mom screws her smile back on. “Isn’t it about time for the bouquet toss?”

Abby drags Tish up to the front with her for that, but they both miss by feet. For the garter toss, Abby and Tish wheedle Jonny out of his sulk to make him participate.

“ _Mon cher,_ ” Tish says with her best Puss in Boots eyes. “ _Mon ange_. _Mon petit chou._ Would you please bring me the garter?”

He rolls his eyes, but he fetches that garter as reliably as a well-trained golden retriever.

“Good boy,” Abby whispers in Tish’s ear as he comes back to the table with it, and they both start falling on each other laughing.

Across the table from them, Mom shakes her head. “Better put that order in with Thea.”

Tish looks around in confusion. “What?”

“I’m going to get another drink,” Mom announces, getting to her feet.

Abby giggles herself nearly to death.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The book of love is long and boring_  
>  And written very long ago  
> It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes  
> And things we're all too young to know
> 
>  
> 
> \- The Magnetic Fields

The weekend after Abby's birthday, Terry comes to visit. For once Abby believes him when he claims this is purely a social call. He has reinjured his surgically repaired shoulder, and a sling holds his arm snug against his side.

“You like blues?” he asks Abby in Jonny’s living room on Saturday. “The Howlin’ Wolf has somebody new playing tonight.”

“That place is twenty-one and up,” she points out.

He and Jonny wave that off.

That night, she feels more than a little smug as she climbs onto a bar stool at a candlelit table. On either side of her, Tish unwinds her wrap and Terry watches the band set up with interest.

“Drinks?” Jonny says, looking to Tish first.

“A lemon drop, please.”

When he looks at Abby, she hesitates. Mom and Dad sometimes pour her a glass of wine at home, Aunt Thea always lets her taste whatever specialty cocktail she makes at holidays, and it’s not like she’s never been to a party. But she doesn’t know what anything is called. A lemon drop sounds good. Like candy. “Um, I’ll have the same.”

Terry and Tish cast nearly identical judgy looks at Jonny.

He rolls his eyes at them. “No, I’m not going to bring her vodka.” He smiles at Abby. “I’ll surprise you.”

He doesn’t take Terry’s order. Apparently he already knows it.

The guitarist introduces the band just as Jonny returns to the table with two drinks in each hand. Abby gets to try the lemon drop, which is disgusting, and Terry’s Old Fashioned, which is foul. All in all, she is happy with her fizzy ginger beer thing.

Terry relaxes into his chair as the music starts, and just a few bars in he is already smiling.

“It’s a little repetitive, isn’t it?” Abby says skeptically after the first verse. “We get it, he went down to the crossroads, got down on his knees.”

“It’s a standard,” he says, a little defensively. “Robert Johnson, 1936.”

She tilts her chin at him. “You’re a secret nerd, aren’t you? A music nerd.”

He narrows his eyes. “Drink your mocktail.”

Three songs later, the band launches into “Love Her With a Feeling,” and Jonny and Tish abandon them to go be clingy and embarrassing with all the other people swaying and grinding on each other up by the stage. Terry watches them disappear into the knot of people, and he gives a little scoff.

It has been six months since his longtime, on-again off-again girlfriend ended things for good. It occurs to Abby that one third of all blues music is “Baby, don’t go” and another third is “Baby done gone.” Marinating in whiskey and misery might be less than ideal.

“So how is Matt doing?” she starts to say.

But on the table, Jonny’s phone vibrates. Abby turns it over, and a text from Mom flashes up - _I need you green RIGHT NOW._

“Go get him,” Terry says. “Quick.”

Abby weaves through the crowd on the dance floor, and when she taps Jonny on the shoulder and holds up his phone, he knows what’s up before he has even read the words. He cranes his neck, meets Terry’s eyes over the crowd, and asks a silent question. Terry nods and shoos him.

Jonny slips out a side door, and Abby tries not to stare after him.  He gets called away a lot, and she rarely ever finds out why.

Tish takes her hand and pulls her toward the band. “Come dance with me.”

For the last few verses of this ridiculous song, Abby does her best to have a good time. As the guitar fades out, she taps Tish’s arm. “Let’s not leave Terry alone.”

But he isn’t. A girl has installed herself on the stool across from him, and when she leans forward, she seems in danger of spilling out of her shirt. Terry is leaning in too, with a smile Abby has never seen him wear before.

“Oh. That was fast.”

“He already has two dates,” Tish says, drawing herself up tall. “And that is my seat.”

“No, no,” Abby says, turning back toward the band. “If he’s got company, then we don’t have to babysit him.”

Somehow it is extra annoying, knowing that Terry thinks he’s the one looking after them. All of those significant glances between him and Jonny were to confirm one sheepdog staying on duty while the other ran off after wolves.

Abby refuses to be a sheep. She’s ten times smarter and has much better hair. She is going to enjoy dancing, no boys necessary. Moreover, she and Tish are perfectly capable of getting home safely without the supervision of Terrence McGinnis, thank you very much. Let him wear that cheeseball smile all the way home with Tits McGee.

Next second, guilt squirms in her chest. She hears Mom’s voice, right after a similarly bitter comment a few weeks ago: “Junebug, being nasty about girls with boobs is not going to magically make you a C-cup.” She gestured up and down her torso with a very pointed look. “Believe me.”

Abby sighed, slouching onto the kitchen island. “Yeah, okay.”

Mom took the seat opposite, and, not without sympathy, looked at Abby over the tops of her glasses. “Seriously, don’t go taking your insecurities out on other women. We’ve already got plenty of people judging us by our bodies.”

So tonight, Abby studiously avoids stealing glances at the table in the corner. She tries not to wonder where Jonny might be and heroically resists texting Mom for updates. And somehow she puts up with three more sad songs about worried lives and thrills being gone and the sky crying. It’s called blues, right? She can’t say she wasn’t warned.

“Home?” she finally asks Tish.

Tish doesn’t exactly have her mind on the music either, judging by her faint relief. “Home.”

Terry gives them all his attention the moment they come back to the table, and he gets up to leave with a friendly nod and a “Nice talking to you” for his new friend.

At home, they wait. Officially, they make brownies, and Terry eats nearly half the pan by himself. But what they are really doing is waiting.

Mom gets home a little after midnight, and the first thing she says is, “Done for the night, and everybody’s fine. Tired out, but fine.”

But Jonny isn’t with her, which is weird because Tish is here. Usually when he’s tired, he goes where he knows there will be Tish.

“What happened?” Abby says.

Mom hovers near the brownies, eyeing them with interest. “The Bratva’s top enforcer came after a woman who helped us,” she says, and guilt flashes across Tish’s face. “Honestly, I’ve seen what he’s done to other people, and she was lucky to come out of it with just a broken arm. She’s in the ER at the moment.” Mom lets her purse slide down her arm and plop onto the kitchen table. “So is Klokov.”

“He’s not in custody?”

“Well, he’s handcuffed to his hospital bed. Not that he could run anyway. They’re treating him for severe chemical burns to his eyes.”

Abby’s mouth rounds in surprise, and next to her Terry says, “How?”

Mom hikes up onto a stool at the island and rubs at her own eyes beneath her glasses. “Jon threw a half-bottle of cleaning solvent in his face.”

That’s a new one.

“Klokov was trying to stab him,” Mom explains, almost apologetically. “The bottle was right there, and Jon just grabbed the nearest thing, you know? He stuck Klokov’s head under a faucet afterwards, but a quick rinse wasn’t enough. You’re supposed to flush out your eyes continuously until you get to medical help.”

Terry folds his arms. “So the guy’s blind?”

Mom finishes adjusting her glasses and lays her hands in her lap. “Almost definitely, yeah.”

Abby is afraid to ask whether Jonny knew as much when he turned the faucet off.

Tish, on the other hand, raises her chin and says, “I guess he won’t be coming after Maggie or the others again.”

Mom gives Tish a long, steady look, and then, with the faintest wince of a smile, she nods.

“Is Jonny okay?” says Abby.

Mom makes a helpless gesture. “He walked away without a scratch on him.”

“Yeah, but.” Abby raises her eyebrows. “Is he okay?”

There is a brief pause, and then Mom lets out a long exhale. “I don’t think he is.”

“Oh.” Abby glances toward the front of the house. “Where is he?”

Mom’s eyes flicker sideways to Tish for a second before she answers Abby. “I expected him to beat me here.”

Terry gets to his feet. “I think I know where he went.”

They lend him car keys, and he disappears without saying where.

“Can I have one?” Mom says, pointing at the brownie pan. “Only one.”

Tish slides the whole thing toward her.

At one-thirty in the morning, Tish and Abby split the last brownie, and Mom declares it bedtime for everyone. Half an hour later, still tossing and turning, Abby gives up on bed. She sneaks back downstairs with a blanket and a book, and chamomile tea helps calm her down. She is dozing on the sofa when Jonny and Terry come through the front door.

“‘S what I’m sayin’,” Jonny is telling Terry in a slurred voice, slightly too loud for a house full of sleeping people, as they both hang up their coats and scarves. “New policy. We catch them, we blind them. Let’s see the fuckers take aim at civilians after that.”

Abby freezes halfway to sitting.

The Arrow hurts people. She knows he does. Once upon a time, Dad _killed_ people. But Jonny, her goofball big brother, who zips puppies into his jacket and yells along to “Sweet Caroline” at weddings, does not intentionally put people’s eyes out. That is not a thing that he does.

Perhaps that is why he looks a little thrown when he catches sight of her on the sofa. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing.” She stands and comes around the sofa, approaching slowly. “Are you okay?”

“Ignore him,” Terry says. “He’s drunk and running his mouth.”

“You know I'm right,” Jon says, jabbing his finger into Terry's chest. “This whack-a-mole bullshit would be over in, like, a _week_ if we did that.”

“Sure, it would,” Terry says, trying to herd Jon to the stairs.

Jon refuses to be herded. He starts counting off on his fingers, saying, “Murder a witness? Blind. Shoot up an apartment building and then torch the place? Blind. Traffic women and break their arms?” His lip curls. “Fuck you, asshole. No more eyes for you.”

Abby hugs herself, rocking a little on her heels. “You don’t mean that.”

He rounds on her. “Are you the one getting shot at? Don’t you fucking tell me what I mean.”

Abby’s insides twist up. Then Terry takes a step toward Jon, and _whumpf_ her brother hits the floor.

It takes her a few seconds to work out that Terry has just hooked his foot around Jon’s ankle and hip-checked him right off his feet. Now Jon sprawls in a graceless heap on the rug, and Terry stands over him calmly, one eyebrow raised.

“Yeah, okay,” Jon mutters. He sits up, but he keeps his head ducked down. “Had that coming.”

“You can thank me when you’re sober,” Terry says. Then he adjusts his sling, reaches out with his good arm to ruffle Abby’s hair, and heads upstairs.

Jonny looks up at her from the floor, and sorry is all over his face.

She shifts her weight over her feet, and she tries to swallow down the stupid jitters in her stomach. He didn’t mean it, and she can tell he regretted it before he had even hit the floor. But her brother has never snarled at her before. It’s like the ground just wobbled under her.

“Hey,” he says, getting to his feet and straightening his clothes. “Abby, I’m sorry. That was out of line.” He holds out his hand to her, and he gestures her hopefully toward him. “Come here?”

She doesn’t come here, but she does let him wrap himself around her.

“‘M sorry,” he says again, chin propped on her head.

He smells like laundry detergent and vodka, and he settles her jitters. She lets her shoulders unknit and takes a deep breath. “It’s okay.”

“I don’t know what I was…” He shakes his head. “I don’t know why I’m such a dick sometimes.”

Honestly, she still feels a bit like crying. Another deep breath, and she says, “You know, you didn’t used to be a mean drunk.”

He stands up a little straighter, and he goes very still.

“What’s going on with you?” she says, as much above a whisper as she can manage without her voice cracking.

He might be holding his breath.

She ducks out from under his chin to look up at him. “Jonny?”

He clears his throat, and he glances around the dark, quiet foyer. Then he jerks his head toward the back of the house. She follows him to the sun room, drafty at this time of year but very difficult to hear from any other part of the house, and he takes a seat on the silly indoor swing that Mom hates and Dad loves to nap on.

They get settled among the throw pillows, and he keeps his eyes forward even as she scootches around to sit cross-legged facing him. She waits expectantly, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Jon,” she says softly.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

She lets her shoulders round, and she rests her hands on her knees. “The drinking kind of seems stress-related.”

“No, I mean…” He closes his eyes. “The hood. The Arrow. I don’t know why I’m doing it.”

Oh, crap. That was way more than she was expecting to get out of him.

“We shut down the Hand, and the Three-Sixteen expanded to fill the power vacuum,” he says, scrubbing his palms down his face. “We took them out, and the Bratva moved in. Blew up their gun-running operation, and then they started extorting protection money out of the local hookers.”

Abby thinks of last spring, when she asked Dad, _Do we ever win?_

Jonny leans his elbows on his knees, and she is abruptly certain that he would not be telling her any of this if it weren’t for all the vodka. “I don’t even know if I’m helping. And the people trusting me to protect them…” He shakes his head.

“You come through,” she says. “Every time.”

He gives her an irritable look. “Friend of mine got her arm broken at the elbow tonight. Just - _snap_. It’s fucking loud, up close.”

“You saved her life.”

“Which was only in danger because I went off half-cocked and blew her cover a few weeks back.” He makes an impatient gesture, lets his hands smack down in his lap, and jolts back against the swing.

“Think of it this way,” she says, hands coming up to manipulate concepts in midair. “The more you take on, the worse it looks without actually being worse. Say you have a ninety percent success rate with saving people you set out to save. The more you try to do, the more people are going to fall into that ten percent that are just beyond your help.”

He narrows his eyes at her skeptically.

“Because math,” she concludes.

His mouth quirks. You couldn’t call it a smile.

She deflates a bit. “This isn’t making you feel any better, is it?”

He gives her a tight smile, leaning back into the swing. “Don’t really want to, at the moment.”

“Well, but.” The moment? They’ve been through six months of this, off and on. She takes a deep breath, and she dives in: “You’ve kind of been… having a hard time since that house fire.”

By the stricken look on his face, she knows she has tapped the root of it.

She tries and fails to catch his eyes. “Mom said there wasn’t anything you could have done.”

There is a long, long silence, in which he might be trying to burn a hole in the wall with that glare. Abby bites her lip to stopper her questions. She should give him a minute. Let him think if he needs to. Hold off on asking him things like, Are you supposed to be omnipotent? What’s the standard here? What perfect, flawless, hypercompetent Superman are you comparing yourself to?

Stupid question. She knows who.

Jonny would scoff at accusations of hero worship, and he is first in line to cheerfully remind Dad of “that time you misspelled your wife’s name on her birthday card” or “that time you signed over a multibillion dollar corporation to a domestic terrorist.”

But in his bones, in his heart of hearts, Jonny believes that Dad is… the Arrow.

Which he is, obviously. He put on the hood and started it all.

But the Arrow is bigger than him now. He has become a symbol that moves some people to tears and others to quaking rage. He is a marketing gimmick for local businesses and an “authentic” reference in the song lyrics of local indie bands. He is an impossibly proportioned demigod graffitied on neglected corners of the Glades. He never misses and never bleeds and never doubts.

No one can be that.

“The little girl,” Jonny says at long last. “Breanna. She died shielding her little brother. None of the news stories mentioned that.”

Abby inclines her head to him. “They said they found them huddled together.”

“She was protecting him,” Jonny says, and for someone who claims to find the whole concept of faith bizarre, he says it with surprising conviction. “She wrapped him up in the corner. That nine year old was braver than most of the fucking armed guards I know.”

Somewhere in the vague region that is not quite her throat and not quite her chest, something inside Abby clenches up hard. There are words tangled in there - some big, important idea that she can only glimpse piecemeal - and she would explain it to him if she understood it herself.

Dad knew.

The night her parents took her to Panoptic’s basement and told her a very long story, Dad sat down on the floor with his back to a glass case full of sharp things. She remembers wondering if those arrows and flechettes and knives had ever been used, and if someone had ever had to wipe them clean of blood.

“And then a fishing trawler picked me up,” Dad concluded. “That part, you know.”

She went to sit next to him, and she pulled her knees up to her chest. “Didn’t anything good happen in all that time?”

He looked at Mom, watching them from her desk chair, ankles crossed. Finally, he said, “Yes, it did.”

Abby shook her head. “You haven’t mentioned a single one.”

“I saw people do some incredibly brave things,” he said slowly. “Even knowingly and willingly go to their deaths. And most of the time, they were doing it for love. For family.”

She tilted her head at him. “Even the good things were people dying?”

He squished her closer to his side. “I don’t know how to explain, baby.”

Tonight, Abby scoots closer to Jonny’s side, because she doesn’t know how to explain either. The closest she can get might be this: “She must’ve loved him a lot.” She makes sure to look him right in the face when she adds, “Reminds me of somebody I know.”

She can’t remember the last time she saw Jonny’s eyes well up.

Abby lays her head on his shoulder and tugs his arm around her, and he squeezes hard. She waits a long time, and finally he says: “I was right there. A flight of stairs away. I could have...”

How many people have been just a flight of stairs away, or a building away, or a block away? Or even a few feet of cinderblock wall? “No, you couldn’t. You’re not God.”

He exhales. His grip on her loosens, then he lays his arm along the back of the swing, easing into a slouch. “It’s just fucked up.”

“Yeah,” she says, because sometimes that’s all you can say. “I’m so sorry.”

He sets them in motion, and for a little while they creak back and forth and watch the shadows sway on the floor.

“Jonny?”

His heel drags on the hardwood. “Hmm?”

“It won’t always feel like this.”

He still sounds a little croaky when he says, “Dunno. Been going on for a while.”

She nods. “And you can’t imagine a time when it gets easier. You feel tired just thinking about having to keep going, no end in sight, not sure there’s even a point to any of it.”

He botches the rhythm, and the swing twists a little bit sideways.

“That feeling won’t last,” she says. “I promise. _Gam zeh ya'avor_.”

There is a long pause, in which she is not at all certain that he remembers what the Hebrew means. The first time Abby heard it, he was definitely right there on the sofa next to her. She was ten years old and miserable with strep throat that night, and Mom tapped her on the nose and said a few unfamiliar syllables.

Jonny looked up from his physics homework. “What?”

“It’s from an old story,” Mom told them. She worried her lip and said, “Let’s see. It was King Solomon. He wanted a piece of wisdom that would always be true, no matter what. So he had a ring made with a special inscription, true for every situation. Weddings, funerals, the zombie apocalypse - anything. Plus it had the power to make sad people happy and happy people sad.”

“What did it say?” Abby said.

“ _Gam zeh ya’avor_.” Mom started pouring pink amoxicillin into a tiny plastic cup. “This too shall pass.”

It was seven years ago. Maybe Jonny has forgotten.

But at last he says, very quietly, “And until then?”

She shrugs. “Until then, you win every day you get up and fight.”

He lets out a little huff of air. “You’ve been talking to Dad.”

“It sounds better when he says it.”

Jonny jostles her. “You’ll do.”

At home after her first and only visit to the lair, Abby climbed in bed with Mom. They tossed the big shiny sham pillows aside, and they made a comfortable nest for themselves. Over the soft hiss of the shower in the adjacent bathroom, Mom whispered, “I’ll tell you a good thing that happened.”

“What’s that?”

She started gathering Abby’s hair into a twist to get it off her neck. “Your father.”

These are their father’s demons they are fighting now. Somewhere in the tangle caught at the base of her throat, Abby finds a thread of something heavy and golden and resilient. She thinks it might be pride.

She puts her feet on the ground, and she helps Jonny straighten out the swing.

 

It would be nice if Jonny woke up the next morning with a whole new outlook on life. Abby would happily settle for him never snapping at anyone with alcohol on his breath ever again.

That is not what happens.

But over the next few weeks, she sees him trying. He comes home for dinner more often than he has since moving out, and several times she catches him in a moment of stressed out frustration, counting down from three before he talks.

Mom notices too. “What did you say to him?” she asks Abby.

Abby shrugs, because she is quite certain that Mom and Dad have attempted multiple heartfelt talks, offered up the wisdom of experience, and also provided six therapists to choose from. It's what they did for her. “Nothing he hasn't heard before.”

“I guess this time it was you saying it.”

“Right, because I'm the authority on this stuff.”

“On depression? I think by now you know a little something. And, baby, he cares what you think." Mom meets her eyes insistently. "A lot more than you realize.”

A couple of years ago Abby would have laughed at the idea that Jon cared what anyone thought, least of all his tag along kid sister. But these days she can believe it.

Mom gives her a fond smile. “He doesn't want to fall off that white horse for you.”

“I don't think it's that,” Abby says thoughtfully. “I'm just the only one who hasn't been steeped in Team Arrow like a little green tea bag. Maybe he thinks I'm normal enough to have a sense of perspective.”

Mom gives her a skeptical eyebrow, but she nods. “Maybe so.”

 

 

The week before Valentine's Day, the whole Queen-Diggle-Lance clan comes together for dinner.

Milena makes prime rib, and Dad makes a point of coming home early. Abby walks into the dining room to find Jonny and Aunt Thea setting the table, and she catches the tail end of a murmured exchange.

“You think she would’ve minded?” Jonny says.

Aunt Thea gives him a sly sort of grin. “Oh, definitely. But she left all of it to me, so it's my call now.”

“What's your call?” Abby says.

Jonny raises an eyebrow. “Think fast,” he says, and throws a napkin ring at her.

Over dessert, Laurel tells the table that her favorite judge has just sentenced two of the Three Sixteen responsible for the shooting and fire at the Riverview Apartment complex. “We piled on charges, and most of them stuck.”

“Thirty years,” Mom says with an approving nod. “Each.”

Jonny looks at his plate, and he leaves the congratulations on closing the case to the rest of the family. When the conversation turns elsewhere, Abby notices Tish resting her hand on his knee.

After dinner Jonny and Laurel take their coffee out to the veranda, and Dad catches Abby when she tries to follow.

“Come help me reset my glassbook,” he says, steering her away. “My calendar won't load again.”

“You mean so that Jonny and Laurel can have a talk about self-medicating with alcohol?”

This time she has been too clever. Dad gives her a very patient look and says, “Yes, actually, that is exactly what I mean.”

Chastened, Abby follows him. The glassbook is an easy fix.

That week, the theater department runs themselves so ragged that, the day after their last matinee performance of _Our Town_ , the entire cast gets sick. Elaine makes a house call with a tongue depressor and a bright light to declare Abby’s sore throat officially not strep. “It's viral, junebug,” she says grimly. “You're just going to have to soldier through.”

“Can I get a note for the lady in the office? She accused us all of just being super hungover from the cast party.”

“You can have a note,” Elaine says, digging in her bag, “and you can have a steroid shot to smooth out the symptoms.”

Abby grimaces. “A shot? I think I'd rather just be sick.”

“You are not that much of a wuss,” Elaine says, pulling out disinfectant and a set of shrink-wrapped needles in a plastic case. She gives Abby her most wholesome, trustworthy smile, which is in fact wholesome and trustworthy on a level with Mr. Rogers. “Come on, it'll only sting for a second.”

Elaine is smoothing down a Sesame Street band aid when Mom comes in, holding up a picture on her cell.

“Abby, was Grandma Queen’s jewelry your idea?”

Abby gives her a blank stare.

“I’m going to say no.” Mom settles on the sofa, making an impressed moue. “Thought of it all by himself then.”

Elaine crumples up paper backings and says, “What are you talking about?”

“Jon’s been looking for a Valentine's present for Tish, and he asked Aunt Thea if he could have a piece of Moira’s jewelry. Thea gave him the run of the collection, and she just texted me this.” Mom gathers the image off the screen of her phone, and she holds the holo up for inspection. It’s a princess-length pearl necklace draped artfully in a box lined with dove gray velvet. “That’s what he asked for.”

“Oh, she'll love that,” Elaine says. “It's exactly her style.”

Abby raises her eyebrows. “Aunt Thea gave it to him?”

Mom drags up the caption on the image: _Mom always said pearls want to be worn._

“Huh.”

“Did you want it?” Mom says with mild concern. She holds the holo closer, as if she can hand the necklace over this very moment. “Maybe you should have had first dibs.”

“No, no, no.” Abby has a nearly identical necklace that she rarely wears, and Grandma Queen had so much jewelry that no single piece carries much sentimental value.

But Grandma Queen would have minded. To her, the borders distinguishing her flesh and blood from the mass of humanity were clearly marked and heavily fortified.

Abby looks at Elaine, who is packing up her kit, and she wonders what Grandma Queen would think of the patchwork family of ex-bodyguards and ex-girlfriends and ex-vigilantes who show up to Thanksgiving every year.

Abby smiles and collapses the holo onto the screen. “No, I think Tish should have it.”

 

Abby sits fidgeting on the sofa in Dad’s study, watching him scroll down her glassbook with his eyebrows raised faintly over his reading glasses. Occasionally he gives her screen an appreciative nod.

“The second paragraph is really not the strongest,” she says to break the silence. “I thought I could rework the--”

Dad holds up a finger, flashes her a quick smile, and keeps reading.

Her heel bounces. She catches herself, tries to sit still, and then flops sideways against the throw pillow.

Finally, Dad sets aside the essay and looks up at her. A smile spreads across his face.

She sits up straight. “Yeah?”

“I don’t think it needs reworking. The first sentence is a great hook, that second paragraph is--” he glances down at the screen again--“Well, it’s very vivid.”

He should know. He was there for exactly what she’s describing. Post-kidnapping PTSD does indeed make for a hell of a college application essay.

Dad scrolls to the final sentence again, and he smiles a sad, fond sort of smile. “And you finish strong.”

“So you don’t have any changes to recommend?”

“Just one.” He holds out her glassbook and points to a word. “I think you want discrete with an E-T-E, not E-E-T.”

No, she doesn’t, but thanks anyway, Dad. He gives solid advice on content, but spelling is not his forte. “I’ll run it by my English teacher one last time.”

He gets up and comes around his big desk to sit on the sofa next to her and hand over the glassbook. As she tucks it into the carrying case, he says, “So if they like this, we fly you out there to audition, right?”

Something flutters in her stomach, because a month does not feel like enough time to prepare for a face-to-face interview and artistic review. Gotham University is competitive, and the School of Performing Arts even moreso. “Yep, that’s the plan.”

“Gotham feels like the right place?” he presses. “And you’re sure the school is a good fit?”

There are music schools much closer to home. Right down the street, SCU has a very prestigious program, and she already knows some of the professors from her work with the Summer Lyric Theater. Abby could study exactly what she loves and be home for dinner with her parents. Drop by Jonny’s apartment on a whim. Go shopping with Elaine on a phone call’s notice.

It would probably work out fine, and Dad would not be looking at her with badly concealed worry, already anticipating missing her.

Guilt twinges in her chest. “It just feels right, Dad.”

Maybe she won’t get in, and she won’t have to see that look again.

Dad nods, and he takes off his glasses and folds them neatly into their case. “I don’t know what we’re going to do if none of the dorms allow animals.”

“Oh, Percy is coming with me,” Abby says firmly. “Mom will get him classified as a therapy dog if she has to. Anything to get him out of the house.”

“All right then.” Dad gives her a stern look. “If you go three thousand miles away, you have to promise me you’re going to stay on your meds without anybody nagging you.”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course I’m going to take the pills.”

Solemnly he holds up his pinky finger.

“Oh my God, Dad.”

He pokes her in the chest with it. “Swear.”

She gives in and hooks fingers. “I swear.” Then she glances sideways at the doors of his study, which she left cracked open a little bit when she came in here. She bites her lip.  “And do you think maybe you could not tell anybody until we hear back? I mean, I guess Mom. But nobody else has to know, right?”

Pinky still hooked around hers, he bounces their hands slightly in midair. “No telling.”

On her way out of his study, she stops in the doorway and glances over her shoulder. “Hey, what happens if you break a pinky swear?”

Totally and completely deadpan, Dad lays out his little finger on his desk, and with his other hand he mimes chopping it off.

Abby scoffs, and she slips out of his study before he can see her smiling.

 

On May 1, a letter arrives on thick linen stationery, marked with the seal of the University of Gotham.

Abby shrieks through the whole house, waving her letter, and she jumps Mom in the kitchen for a staggering hug. “I got in, I got in, I got in!”

Mom freaks out right back at her, and they get so loud poor Percy turns in distressed circles and licks Abby’s hands in appeasement. She kneels down and snuggles him, babytalking some approximation of, “Gonna be my dorm buddy, aren't you, pretty boy? Yes, sweet boy, you are coming with _me._ ”

Mom calls Dad on speaker, breathless and beaming, to tell him the news.

“I knew they'd snap you up,” he says, and there is not even a note of wistfulness on it. “I'm so proud of you, honey.”

Only Jonny does not seem one hundred percent overjoyed.

He says all the right things – “That’s awesome, congratulations, you’re going to be great” – but he has never been difficult to read. It’s all there on his face, when his mouth isn’t busily turning his inner monologue outer. Abby can practically hear him: _Wait, back up, you’re leaving? No. Why are you leaving?_

She takes care to tell him how often she’ll be able to fly home and how easy it will be to vidchat whenever they want. He nods along dutifully.

It feels strange to wonder if he will be all right without her.

“Do me a favor?” Abby asks Tish that night, both of them sitting cross-legged in pajamas on her bed.

Tish smiles and sets aside her half-eaten square of Ghirardelli dark chocolate. “What’s that?”

“My brother takes a lot of looking after. I was hoping I could trust you with him.”

The smile deepens. “Of course. Any special instructions?”

“Oh, you know. Don’t get wet and don’t feed after midnight.”

Tish gives her a long hug, at which she is excellent. She doesn’t smell like vanilla anymore - and it was only when she stopped that Abby realized why she’d worn it at all - but she is her own comforting fragrance. For the first time Abby takes a moment to think about everyone she'll be leaving behind.

She is tempted to ask for reassurance from someone who grew up in Gotham, who made her own cross-country move, and who also managed to tame Abby’s jaw tension and teach her to sight read.

_Is this the right thing? Am I making a horrible mistake?_

Instead she relaxes into the hug, and then she lunges for Tish’s chocolate.

“Abigail Queen, don’t you dare!”

They stay up giggling for another hour.

  
  
  


In August of 2045, Abby stands at the window of her dorm room at the University of Gotham, three thousand miles from home. Mom sextuple-checks the data library she installed at the desktop, and Dad straightens the beribboned cork board he mounted on the wall. Percy busily sniffs every corner for the fourth time.

Eventually, her parents run out of things to fix up exactly right for her.

“It’s six-thirty,” Abby reminds them gently.

“I know.” Mom’s hands nest together at the base of her throat. “I know it’s time.” She turns to Dad and says, a little too brightly, “We’ve got a flight to catch.”

Dad nods, smoothing the coverlet down.

“Thank you so much,” Abby whispers. “For everything.”

“Come here, baby.” Mom squeezes her hard, and when she pulls away, she smiles through tears and presses her forehead to Abby’s. “Be good. But not too good. And yell for help if you need it.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.” Mom squeezes her one more time, and then she hurries out of the room.

Dad looks over the mini fridge, the lofted beds, and the dresser drawers he moved twice for her. He spares half a smile for Percy, gnawing at an itch on his belly.

The moment Dad finally looks her in the eyes, her throat constricts. “You’re all set?”

She nods.

He wraps her up in his arms. “You are going to do wonderful things. I know you are.”

That’s it. She’s crying. Damn it, Dad.

“Don’t forget,” he says, bending over to lay his cheek on her hair, “we’re never far away.”

She nods into his button-down.

“Bye, junebug.”

Her voice will crack if she speaks above a whisper. “Bye, Daddy.”

He kisses her head, and then he’s gone.

Abby sits down on her newly made bed, and she lets Percy half-sit on her and lick her wet, salty face. It is a very long time before she is ready to get up again.

But warm evening wind rustles the unfamiliar trees outside her window, and beyond them the quad is strung with banners and milling with people. Past the university’s gates, the whole city waits for her. On one of those imposing rooftops, she knows someone is standing guard.

Abby is Moira Dearden Queen’s granddaughter, with all due pride and shame. She has her father’s eyes, according to people who have seen her angry.

But she is not chained to Starling by her family’s sins, nor is it the anvil on which she hammered out her identity. She is not Mom, who could have gone anywhere, but who fell in love with the city and learned its secrets better than the natives.

Abby is heir to a fortune, to heartache and heroism, and to one set of magnolia hair combs carved from mother of pearl.

She smooths down the coverlet again, and she goes outside.


End file.
